Eternal Lies

This is a Call of Cthulhu campaign that has been transformed into a glowfic. The GM is westwind; players are hearts, Kel, nextworldover, risingape, apprenticebard, and sphinx. It is available here. https://glowfic.com/boards/171 Discussion of Eternal Lies is, by preference, located in omnipolis's Eternal Lies channel. People who are not in omnipolis but would like to talk about Eternal Lies are encouraged to message westwind for an invite.

Investigators

Investigators

Anemone Silverstring

Circus sideshow attraction creator with a PhD in bullshitting. Seven feet of personality crammed into a little more than five feet of human. Sickly, not that that she ever lets that stop her. Tarot card reader. Does not have a defined D&D alignment because, were she somehow to wind up in Golarion's afterlife, she could make a completely convincing case for whichever of the nine alignments she felt like.

Stats

Attributes
Best Skills

Background Elements

Description

Sickly half-Maya woman who wears a mix of modern American clothing and shawls or belts sporting native American patterns.

Ideology

Anemone collects superstitious beliefs and adds them to her own, constantly revising her understanding of how to control the spiritual and consequently the physical world. She believes that people should respect the unknown and various spiritual powers, and be willing to call on spirits in times of great need, but also make sure to look out for their own interests.

People

Thomas Octavian Silverstring, Anemone's younger brother. She worked hard to take care of him after the death of their parents. Key background connection.

Zephora, an old woman of unknowable age who did fortune telling and magic tricks near the circus before her health began to deteriorate. Currently lives with her grandson in NYC.

The Librarian, Anemone's monstrous childhood imaginary friend. It eats stories. If you're helpful it will tell you some.

Magnificence, her trained squirrel monkey. He gets treats if he brings her interesting things.

Place

The Circus. The only home she's ever known. Wherever the tents are right now is home.

Possessions

A banjo. Inherited from her father.

A patchwork quilt. Her mother sewed it for her when she was a baby.

A set of journals. Anemone uses them to record myths, legends, paranormal anecdotes, and encounters with the strange, mystical, or exotic.

Personality

Curious. Wants to learn about new ideas and unfamiliar stories, especially when she thinks something genuinely bizarre might be going on.

Storyteller. Anemone loves telling stories and trying to pass the implausible off as truth. She also likes using her storytelling skills to entertain, ground, and calm down other people.

Superstitious. Takes comfort in assigning significance to various objects or actions and imagining that she can control various events by taking the right actions. Also believes in omens and divination.

Collector. Hoards whatever weird stuff she can get her hands on, and takes comfort in being able to own things that expand her knowledge of the world.

Equipment

Investigators

Anita Teller

Stats

Attributes
Best Skills

Background Elements

Description
Attractive and well-dressed, skillfully applied makeup
Ideology
Don't be a jackass and don't take yourself too seriously
People

Catherine Tarlow, her sister, an Imrainai. Key background connection.

Connor Teller, her son.

Her two-year-old daughter.

Locations

The Castle, the nightclub where she met her late husband.

Her sister Catherine's house.

Possessions

Her makeup kit.

Her handgun.

The wedding ring she no longer wears.

Personality

Impulsive; free-spirited; protective; materialistic.

Equipment

Investigators

Mordred Orkney

Angry anti-authoritarian socialist journalist. Deep One hybrid who has no idea of this fact. Queer and pining after his best friend. Old money with abusive parents who got out as quickly as he could. Conlanger. Miskatonic University graduate. Really, really fucking hates asylums.  

Stats

Attributes
Best Skills

Background Elements

Description

Sharp-faced. Undefinably weird-looking. Needs a haircut.

Ideology

Angry antiauthoritarian 1930s socialist journalist

Person

Gale: his best friend. Mordred's a little in love with him, not that he'd ever say so. Key background connection. 

Agravaine: his older half-brother. 

As of 'if we fight it we still have a chance': Desperately, unsuccessfully, pretending everything is normal and fine; Mordred feels guilty about causing him nightmares and guilty about not feeling guilty enough to stop.

Inaaya: his girlfriend. Joined the Bangkok cult when she was sixteen. Born in India with psychic powers; taught herself to read from books she dug out of the garbage. Deeply idealistic.

Morgan: his aunt. Told him the occult existed and immediately vanished without a trace.

Place

His apartment. He and Agravaine live together, and it's the only place he's ever lived where he had meaningful freedom.

Possessions

Knife: the first thing he ever bought with his own money

Blue sea glass: Morgan gave it to him when he was a teenager. There's something strange about how it reflects light.

Conlang notes: he's a nerd okay

As of 'fancy condos in beverly hills': Gale's rosary: a promise he made to his friend that he'd be safe.

Personality

Furious: Wants to fight the entire world. It's why he became a journalist and not something with better pay, because the world is broken and he is furious that it is broken.

Loyal: His moral principles are weird but he cares about them deeply and would die for any of his loved ones.

Phobias

Deep water

Equipment

Investigators

Oswald Ferrier

Former accountant for and abuse victim of his foster father Samson Trammel, the cult leader who was voted Most Deserving To Be Eaten By Gol-Goroth twelve years running. His sister is the most important person in his world, a fact not particularly changed by her membership in the cult of Nyarlathotep. Lev's boyfriend. 

Stats

Attributes
Best Skills

Background Elements

Description

Forbidding, anguished, striking

Ideology

Secular

People

His sister, Lacie, now a cultist.

His boyfriend Lev.

Location

At the piano in his adoptive home.

Possession

Portable radio receiver. Key background connection.

Personality

Loyal

Phobia

Fear of being restrained

Equipment

Investigators

Zoe Aletheia

Circus acrobat. Believes in the power of her luck to protect her from everything that could go wrong and the power of her vigilance and her gun to protect her friends. Nephren Ka is a fan of her work but that's probably going to be fine, right? 

Stats

Attributes
Best Skills

Background Elements

Description

Compact, lithe, solid, graceful

Ideology

Suicide Club lets her practice the skills she needs.

People

[as of 'hold your hat and hang on to your soul'] She has to stay away from Ralph to keep him safe. Anemone's memory reminds her that the story isn't over yet. Zoe promised Anemone to take full responsibility for Magnificence's care and wellbeing.

Location

[as of 'hold your hat and hang on to your soul'] The circus is a reminder of a life she can no longer have.

Possession

Corde lisse clears her mind and makes her love her body.

Personality

[as of 'hold your hat and hang on to your soul'] Zoe can trust that things will eventually work out for her. She needs to protect her friends. They will be okay if she is good enough.

Equipment

Investigators

Magnificence

Circus squirrel monkey, trained to do tricks and steal things by Anemone. Zoe considers herself responsible for him. Often confused by human behavior. In his defense, humans are VERY confusing.

Stats

Attributes

[All stats are given as the equivalent for humans.]

Best Skills

Background Elements

Description

Adorable squirrel monkey

Ideology

Look out for yourself

People

Thomas Octavian Silverstring. He didn't appreciate it the last time Mordred gave him a treasure. We parted on uncertain terms.

Location

The circus

Possessions

A collection of items he’s stolen or scavenged. The most important item is the six of swords card.

His watch. He doesn’t know how to read it, but he likes the ticking sound it makes if he holds it up to his ear. Anemone noticed this and fastened it around his leg for him.

His expo watch camera. This was the last thing Anemone bought for him, and he wants to develop skills with it that would make her proud. Key backstory connection.

Personality

Observant. Particularly interested in understanding the world around him and the strange objects and people it contains.

Unafraid. Magnificence is accustomed to Anemone getting him out of trouble, and doesn’t worry very much about anything terrible happening to him, even if he does things that would otherwise be quite risky.

Equipment

 

Character Reference By Thread

Character Reference By Thread

Reference (fancy condos in beverly hills)

[spoilers through 'subsequent to the events we have just witnessed']

Great Old Ones

Gol-Goroth: In 1924, Gol-Goroth was successfully summoned by a cult in Los Angeles. He was a horrible beast with entirely too many mouths. He may cause horrible visions of mouths to appear and may cause people to become violent and unstable. 

Nyarlathotep: Walter Winston thought that this was related to something somehow. 

Significant People of Investigators

Mordred Orkney

Gale Dulac. His best friend, who is a devout Catholic and Known Very Good Person. Mordred is a little bit in love with him and will never admit this to anyone.

Agravaine Orkney. His older half-brother, known best person to help you hide the bodies while complaining that really you should not be murdering anyone in the first place. 

Morgan Marsh. His aunt, who told him the occult existed and immediately vanished without a trace. 

Lev Aarons. Mordred rescued him from an asylum and considers himself responsible for his well-being. Fortunately, Lev is also really cute and enjoys infodumping about anthropology. Mordred has some conflicted feelings about this fact.  

Zoe Aletheia

Ralph Haas. Her best friend, an antiquarian who collects strange and unusual items. When she's in New York she swings by his place to do erotic photography. She feels like she has to stay away from him to keep him safe.

Anemone Silverstring. Her rock and a source of sanity in the world. 

Anemone Silverstring

Thomas Octavian Silverstring. Anemone's younger brother. She worked hard to take care of him after the death of their parents.

Zephora. An old woman of unknowable age who did fortune telling and magic tricks near the circus before her health began to deteriorate. Currently lives with her grandson in NYC.

The Librarian. Anemone's monstrous childhood imaginary friend. It eats stories. If you're helpful it will tell you some.

Magnificence. Her trained squirrel monkey. He gets treats if he brings her interesting things.   

Carrie Meadows

Her best friend and housemate, a hot air balloonist. 

Other Important Characters

George Ayers. Lev has been repeatedly trying to contact him. He may or may not exist. 

Echavarria. The cult leader in 1924. He died in front of Lev. 

Janet Winston-Rogers: The funder of the expedition. Daughter of one of the men who attempted unsuccessfully to stop the cult from summoning Gol-Goroth.

Character Reference By Thread

Reference (if we fight it we've still got a chance)

[This page contains spoilers through the end of 'that guy sure looks like plant food to me.']

Great Old Ones

Nyarlathotep: The Big Bad. Also known as The Liar, The Liar From Beyond, The Crawling Chaos, Nephren Ka, the Black Pharaoh, the God with a Thousand Forms, the Mouth, the Thing With A Thousand Mouths, and the Herald of Azathoth. Nyarlathotep is a trickster god with thousands of forms, called Masks. 

In his Mask as the Thing With A Thousand Mouths, Nyarlathotep manifests in the form of mouths. Minor Mouths are the side of an ordinary mouth and appear on walls, floors, or the bodies of his followers; they can hiss and spit acid. Major Mouths appear on walls and are larger than a human being; they drool Nectar. Nectar is a drug which makes you sharper and cleverer and harder working and more ambitious and more insightful and generally on top of the world. It is addictive.

The Mouths and some cultists speak the Tongue of Lies, a nonhuman language that rends the sanity of those who hear it. 

In His Mask as Nephren Ka, Nyarlathotep has been regularly visiting Zoe's acrobatics performances and making cryptic, ominous, and plausibly hallucinatory visitations. 

Gol-Goroth: Ramon Echavarria told the outer circle of the cult that they worshiped Gol-Goroth, but this is probably wrong. 

Azathoth: Also known as The Watcher (only by the PCs) or the Blind Idiot God. A giant terrifying Eye that Zoe had a vision of; Nyarlathotep is his Herald. 

Cult Leaders and Second-In-Commands

Samson Trammel. Former leader of the Los Angeles cult. Smug, condescending, and the walking human embodiment of Dunning-Kreuger. Abusive foster father of Lacie and Oswald Ferrier. Has achieved the dubious honor of having raped every single person that Oswald cares about even if you make the implausible assumption that he cares about himself. Voted "most deserving of being devoured by a Mouth" fourteen years running. 

Captain Walker. Former second-in-command and current leader of the Los Angeles cult. Knows Mordred's name. 

Savitree Sirikhan. Current head of the Bangkok cult. Terrifyingly good at her job.

Daniel Lowman. Second-in-command of the Bangkok cult. Best known for paying the cult's network of informers. Savitree's boyfriend, who is from Lev's perspective both unfairly pretty and unfairly monogamous. 

JB. Current head of the Mexico City cult, which has been producing too little Nectar but has been producing some very interesting mind-control music. ABSOLUTELY going to do his job AS SOON AS his band gets their big break. You just don't BELIEVE IN HIM. He is FOLLOWING HIS DREAMS. 100% has ADHD. 

Cristobal de la Luz. Birth name Cristobal Vega. Like all Chrises in a cosmic horror setting, absolutely up to something extremely normal and good that 100% does not involve destroying the world even one little bit. JB's boyfriend. Weirdly short and has a high voice? Who knows what's up with that. 

Montgomery Donovan. Head of the Malta cult. Nectar production spiked in February 1934. Apparently "understands with the bitter black dregs of wisdom" that "with magic, the greater the sacrifice the greater the reward," which is literally zero percent ominous. 

Significant People of Investigators

Oswald Ferrier

Lacie Ferrier. Sister who was kidnapped by Samson Trammel and convinced to join the cult as his second-in-command/lover/daughter. Her current whereabouts and fate, given Samson's death, are unknown and Oswald prefers not to think about it.  

Lev Aarons. His boyfriend, with whom he shares certain otherwise unique experiences like being abused by Samson Trammel and having a loved one who has joined the cult because it is so beautiful, and with whom he is vaguely groping towards some concepts such as "it is bad when people rape me."

Mordred Orkney

Gale Dulac. His best friend, who is a devout Catholic and Known Very Good Person. Mordred is a little bit in love with him and will never admit this to anyone.

Agravaine Orkney. His older half-brother, known best person to help you hide the bodies while complaining that really you should not be murdering anyone in the first place. 

Morgan Marsh. His aunt, who told him the occult existed and immediately vanished without a trace. 

Lev Aarons. Mordred rescued him from an asylum and considers himself responsible for his well-being. Fortunately, Lev is also really cute and enjoys infodumping about anthropology. Mordred has some conflicted feelings about this fact.  

Zoe Aletheia

Ralph Haas. Her best friend, an antiquarian who collects strange and unusual items. When she's in New York she swings by his place to do erotic photography. She feels like she has to stay away from him to keep him safe.

Anemone Silverstring. Her rock and a source of sanity in the world. 

Anemone Silverstring

Thomas Octavian Silverstring. Anemone's younger brother. She worked hard to take care of him after the death of their parents.

Zephora. An old woman of unknowable age who did fortune telling and magic tricks near the circus before her health began to deteriorate. Currently lives with her grandson in NYC.

The Librarian. Anemone's monstrous childhood imaginary friend. It eats stories. If you're helpful it will tell you some.

Magnificence. Her trained squirrel monkey. He gets treats if he brings her interesting things.   

Other Important Characters

George Ayers. Former boyfriend of Lev and current corpse. Member of the Inner Circle of the 1924 cult. In 1924, went to Dallol for a dig to find out more information about the Mouth and disappeared. Presumed dead. 

Ramon Echavarria. Former abusive boyfriend of Lev and current corpse. Film producer and original founder of the cult, who died tragically in 1924 when his ritual to summon Nyarlathotep was interrupted by a crew of meddling investigators. Fascinated by the beauty of the Mythos.

Janet Winston-Rogers: The funder of the expedition. Daughter of one of the men who attempted unsuccessfully to stop the cult from summoning Nyarlathotep.

 

Character Reference By Thread

Reference (hold your hat and hang on to your soul)

[This page contains spoilers through the end of 'if we fight it we've still got a chance.']

Great Old Ones

Nyarlathotep: The Big Bad. Also known as The Liar, The Liar From Beyond, The Crawling Chaos, Nephren Ka, the Black Pharaoh, the God with a Thousand Forms, the Mouth, the Thing With A Thousand Mouths, and the Herald of Azathoth. Nyarlathotep is a trickster god with thousands of forms, called Masks. 

In his Mask as the Thing With A Thousand Mouths, Nyarlathotep is a god of power, dominance, and control over others. He manifests in the form of mouths. Minor Mouths are the side of an ordinary mouth and appear on walls, floors, or the bodies of his followers; they can hiss and spit acid. Major Mouths appear on walls and are larger than a human being; they drool Nectar. Nectar is a drug which makes you sharper and cleverer and harder working and more ambitious and more insightful and generally on top of the world. It is addictive, and if used to excess it destroys your goals, so that the only thing you want is to accumulate power so that you are stronger so that you can accumulate more power so that you are stronger so that you can accumulate more power...

The Mouths are fed by dominance over other people, such as in the form of torture. To destroy a Minor Mouth, you must throw in a symbol purified through a process of self-denial, self-abnegation, and self-sacrifice; to destroy a Major Mouth, you must throw in yourself after a similar process of purification.

The Mouths and some cultists speak the Tongue of Lies, a nonhuman language that rends the sanity of those who hear it. 

In His Mask as Nephren Ka, Nyarlathotep has been regularly visiting Zoe's acrobatics performances and making cryptic, ominous, and plausibly hallucinatory visitations. 

Dagon: Sumerian fish-god with a strange connection to the Orkney Islands in Scotland and Innsmouth in Massachusetts. Imprisoning someone who may or may not be Nyarlathotep but who definitely has a Mouth Theme. A book called Revelations of Dagon is about him. Probably has no relationship whatsoever to Mordred Orkney whose family is from Scotland and who grew up near Innsmouth. 

Gol-Goroth: Also known as The Forgotten God. Really into giant stone monoliths, which exist in Ethiopia (Axum) and Hungary. Some connection to the Children of the Night, who are possibly his worshipers and live in Mexico. Ramon Echavarria told the outer circle of the cult that they worshiped Gol-Goroth, but this is probably wrong. 

Azathoth: Also known as The Watcher (only by the PCs) or the Blind Idiot God. A giant terrifying Eye that Zoe had a vision of; Nyarlathotep is his Herald. Possibly worshiped by the Order of St. Frumentius, who believe "Azathoth" to be a secret name of God. 

Cult Leaders and Second-In-Commands

Samson Trammel. Former leader of the Los Angeles cult and current corpse. Smug, condescending, and the walking human embodiment of Dunning-Kreuger. Abusive foster father of Lacie and Oswald Ferrier. Has achieved the dubious honor of having raped every single person that Oswald cares about even if you make the implausible assumption that he cares about himself. Voted "most deserving of being devoured by a Mouth" fourteen years running. Allegedly died of cancer. 

Captain Walker. Former second-in-command and current leader of the Los Angeles cult. The anti-investigators think he is significantly more competent than Samson Trammel; the anti-investigators also believe the investigators to be a team in Captain Walker's employ. Knows Mordred's name. 

Savitree Sirikhan. Current head of the Bangkok cult. Terrifyingly good at her job. Funding the anti-investigators. Mordred has a quixotic quest to try to convince her not to destroy the world. 

Daniel Lowman. Second-in-command of the Bangkok cult. Best known for paying the cult's network of informers and anti-investigators. Savitree's boyfriend, who is from Lev's perspective both unfairly pretty and unfairly monogamous. 

JB. Current head of the Mexico City cult, which has been producing too little Nectar but has been producing some very interesting mind-control music. ABSOLUTELY going to do his job AS SOON AS his band gets their big break. You just don't BELIEVE IN HIM. He is FOLLOWING HIS DREAMS. 100% has ADHD. 

Cristobal de la Luz. Birth name Cristobal Vega. Like all Chrises in a cosmic horror setting, absolutely up to something extremely normal and good that 100% does not involve destroying the world even one little bit. JB's boyfriend. Weirdly short and has a high voice? Who knows what's up with that. 

Montgomery Donovan. Head of the Malta cult. Nectar production spiked in February 1934. Apparently "understands with the bitter black dregs of wisdom" that "with magic, the greater the sacrifice the greater the reward," which is literally zero percent ominous. 

Anti-Investigators

Mariam Soliman. The face. Does not so much "lie constantly" as "say whatever series of words best advances her goals in this conversation," which may or may not bear any relationship to the truth. A determined social climber whose primary objection to the British empire is that she hasn't married a lord yet. Has many people with favors she can call in and absolutely no one she wouldn't stab in the back to stay alive. Wears heavy makeup; animals dislike her. 

Louise Fauche. Oxford-educated archaeologist, polyglot, and general Very Smart Person. Enjoys infodumping about languages.

Inaaya Khadpo. Convicted rationalist and skeptic in a way that is not at all altered by her psychic powers. If magic exists, well then, that is another fact that has to be approached with an empirical mindset and a refusal to believe anything that hasn't been proven. Her political beliefs include women's liberation, free love, pacifism, anti-imperialism, socialism, and anti-Stalinism. She enjoys proving theorems and reading works of popular nonfiction.

Joan Kramer. A woman of many guns and few words, Joan's primary interest is in her continued survival in this horrific world; her secondary interest is in the survival of the rest of the team. Her cynicism and belief that she is inevitably doomed leave her well-suited to the cosmic horror world that she finds herself in. If pressed, she will give her life expectancy as six months and her most likely cause of death as Anchisa. 

Anchisa Sirikhan. Savitree Sirikhan's niece, who has been FORCED to join the anti-investigators AGAINST HER WILL just because her aunt was afraid that she was going to mess around with boys and get into trouble. Everything would be FINE. Everyone keeps talking about boring things all the time and going to boring places with lots of rocks and Anchisa is TIRED OF IT. They went to America and there were not ANY skyscrapers or ANY cowboys. It was terrible. No person has ever suffered as Anchisa has suffered. Currently sleeping with Oswald, whom she sincerely believes is a cool American who can introduce her to jazz musicians. 

Significant People of Investigators

Oswald Ferrier

Lacie Ferrier. Sister who was kidnapped by Samson Trammel and convinced to join the cult as his second-in-command/lover/daughter. Her current whereabouts and fate, given Samson's death, are unknown and Oswald prefers not to think about it.  

Lev Aarons. His boyfriend, with whom he shares certain otherwise unique experiences like being abused by Samson Trammel and having a loved one who has joined the cult because it is so beautiful, and with whom he is vaguely groping towards some concepts such as "it is bad when people rape me."

Mordred Orkney

Gale Dulac. His best friend, who is a devout Catholic and Known Very Good Person. Mordred is a little bit in love with him and will never admit this to anyone.

Agravaine Orkney. His older half-brother, known best person to help you hide the bodies while complaining that really you should not be murdering anyone in the first place. Their relationship is strained due to Agravaine's constant nightmares about Mordred dying and Mordred's refusal to quit investigating. 

Morgan Marsh. His aunt, who told him the occult existed and immediately vanished without a trace. 

Lev Aarons. Mordred rescued him from an asylum and considers himself responsible for his well-being. Fortunately, Lev is also really cute and enjoys infodumping about anthropology. Mordred has some conflicted feelings about this fact.  

Zoe Aletheia

Ralph Haas. Her best friend, an antiquarian who collects strange and unusual items. When she's in New York she swings by his place to do erotic photography. She feels like she has to stay away from him to keep him safe.

Anemone Silverstring. An investigator who died of malaria in Ethiopia. Her memory reminds Zoe that the story isn't over yet. 

Magnificence. Zoe feels she promised Anemone to take full responsibility for Magnificence's wellbeing, and has worked on communicating with him. 

Sister Araari Jeyna

Her abusive father. Araari's father was careless at best and abusive at worst, and she worries that she's following in his footsteps.

Her mother. Araari has a few positive memories of her mother, who died when she was young. Araari wants to make her proud when she's watching from Heaven.  

Anita Teller

Catherine Teller, her sister, an Imrainai.

Connor Teller. Her son, a Connor. 

Her daughter. She is two years old and a Ves.

Other Important Characters

George Ayers. Former boyfriend of Lev and current corpse. Member of the Inner Circle of the 1924 cult. In 1924, went to Dallol for a dig to find out more information about the Mouth. After his dig was destroyed by a nun-induced volcano, he withdrew from Nectar, reconsidered his life choices, and spent the next eight years an increasingly pissy desert hermit. Survived long enough to deliver an exposition dump before he was mercy-killed by his metamour Oswald Ferrier. 

Ramon Echavarria. Former abusive boyfriend of Lev and current corpse. Film producer and original founder of the cult, who died tragically in 1924 when his ritual to summon Nyarlathotep was interrupted by a crew of meddling investigators. Fascinated by the beauty of the Mythos.

Janet Winston-Rogers: The funder of the expedition. Daughter of one of the men who attempted unsuccessfully to stop the cult from summoning Nyarlathotep.

Particularly Important Props

Particularly Important Props

Ayers' Research Notes

Ayers’ research appears to be primarily concerned with Gol-Goroth (a.k.a. the Fisher from Outside) and the Liar from Beyond. The earliest notes seem to indicate that these are one and the same, but later notes seem to evolve an understanding of duality in their nature – possibly indicating that Gol-Goroth is in some way the “herald” or “harbinger” of the Liar.

Echavarria’s Betrayal: In notes dated late 1922, Ayers has a bleak “Eureka!” moment and starts ranting at length in one of his journals about “Echavarria’s grand betrayal.” He describes the cult as a “sham of lies.” The general thrust seems to be a conclusion (or revelation) that none of Echavarria’s rites have anything to do with Gol-Goroth at all. “Let the Forgotten God remain forgotten! Echavarria has shamed the true glory of the Liar from Beyond by cloaking it in the false shroud of the Batrachian One!”

Within a few weeks, however, Ayers’s anger at Echavarria appears to have been forgotten. “Ramon has revealed a great truth to me.” Apparently by piercing the “veil” of Echavarria’s lies, Ayers has proven himself “worthy of the Liar” and has been ushered into the “inner circle of Its worship.” This appears to be a confirmation that Echavarria’s worship was never aimed at Gol-Goroth and that the Forgotten God’s name was used only to mask the true nature of whatever entity bears the title of the Liar From Beyond.

Correspondence with Bartolo Acuna: Ayers’ continued obsession with finding “the truth of the Liar” is given some additional context through the fragmentary remains of his correspondence with Bartolo Acuna, a professor and archaeologist from the Università degli Studi di Roma in Rome. Almost the entirety of this correspondence and much of its associated material is absent, but there are some scraps and notes representative of the research that Ayers was apparently doing in response to the correspondence and which hints at the broad outlines of what the correspondence concerned.

In short: Bartolo Acuna had done some fresh work translating some rare book of lore, discovering that previous translations had been plagued with serious errors. New scholarship allowed him to discover an ancient site of worship for a deity worshiped through rituals of violence and a strict social hierarchy. Four things of note can be discerned from the material which remains:

Particularly Important Props

Books of the Los Angeles Cult

Unaussprechlichen Kulten

Written by the German eccentric von Junzt, the original edition of Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults) is also known as the Black Book. That edition was published in Dusseldorf in 1839; this copy is the cheap and faulty translation pirated by Bridewell in London in 1845. It is nevertheless markedly superior to the better known, but thoroughly expurgated, version published by Golden Goblin Press of New York in 1909. And even more so because the margins of this copy appear to have been heavily annotated by someone consulting the original German text.

Von Junzt (1795-1840) spent his entire life delving into forbidden subjects; he traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and esoteric manuscripts in the original. In the chapters of Nameless Cults, which range from startling clarity to murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of the thinking man. Reading what von Junzt dared put into print arouses uneasy speculations as to what it was that he dared not tell.

In addition to the annotations mentioned above, there are additional annotations in a different hand calling particular attention to specific passages regarding the Black Stone. These annotations appear to cross-reference and copy text selected from some unknown secondary source (perhaps a travelogue of some sort). These notes identify the Black Stone – that curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains of Hungary – as the “spikes of his world” and the “ladders of faith” (intimating, perhaps, that other such monoliths might exist). It is described as octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot and a half thick. Its surface had evidently once been highly polished, but it was now (according to von Junzt) thickly dented as if savage efforts had been made to demolish it (although to little effect). The travelogue draws parallels between the surviving symbols upon the Black Stone and “crude scratches on a gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of the Yucatan”. A note of commentary remarks, “The God of the Black Stone cannot be summoned without the link of His stone or the Fire of his Jewel.”

Benefits of Skimming
Benefits of Poring Over

Cults of the Akumsite Empire

Written as a thesis paper by Brill Davidsen in 1897 and published in a purely limited edition in that year. This copy has been recovered in some sort of fishy hide.

Daviden’s thesis is a remarkable work of scholarship, delving deep into the cult history of the Kingdom of Axum along the Red Sea coast during the 5th century BC, the resurgence of these cults during the Zagwe Dynasty of the 12th century, and even hinting darkly of evidence that the cults were still present (or at least their folk beliefs) well into the 19th century as the interior of Africa was opened to European eyes. There are suggestions that Italian colonists may have carried some of the Aksumite beliefs back to their homeland, possibly infecting Masonic lodges in Venice and Rome with their barbaric rites.

Davidsen also references the Revelations of Dagon, suggesting strange parallels between those apocryphal books of prophecies and lurid blasphemies and the Axumite beliefs he charts over the course of a millennia. At times it is unclear if he is suggesting that both the English text and the Axumite beliefs spring from a common source; or if he believes that the Axumite beliefs may have somehow traveled to Europe much earlier than the 19th century (possibly via Roman legionnaires) and found fertile soil in Celtic Britain. The last three dozen pages of thesis are given over to a detailed symbological analysis of the “Prisoner of Dagon” and the “Wide-Open Mouth”, equating the two figures on a deep level through complicated Jungian metaphors despite the gross differences of their disparate mythologies.

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Fishing the River of Stars

A strange and curious text reputedly among those in the blasphemous library of Auguste Chapdelaine. Recovered during the Second Opium War and brought back to London in 1858, the origins of this anonymous work were lost with Chapdelaine’s life. (Chapdelaine, along with other Chinese Catholics from his circle of followers, was arrested and executed in Yaoshan, helping to precipitate France’s involvement in the war. Reputedly Chapdelaine was condemned for his missionary work, but darker rumors suggest that it was dark rites emerging from his study of forbidden Chinese texts which ultimately brought down the wrath of the local mandarin.)

Fishing the River of Stars is reputedly a first-hand account of the rise of the Northern Song Dynasty during the 10th and 11th centuries in China. Much of its bulk is taken up with routine and unsurprising bureaucratic “revelations”, but the choice passages which have given the book its particular notoriety are those revolving around the legendary engineer Zhang Sixun, who served Emperor Taizu of Song.

Zhang Sixun is said to have been served by a council of “thrice-mouthed advisors”, each of whom was said to “speak with three tongues” and to “balance the words of one hand against the other”. The strangely cryptic and disturbingly inhuman descriptions of these advisors are echoed eerily in a description of the inner (or secret) gardens of Emperor Taizu, where the author reputedly saw flocks of blue-green hummingbirds, their “feathers flecked with gold and with lipped mouths gaping upon their hovering backs”.

There are also suggestions that the ingenious armillary sphere of Zhang Sixun’s astronomical clock tower, which employed liquid mercury in its escapement mechanism, was only the “precursor” or “broken model” of the true clock tower which was “hidden by the Emperor”. This “true tower” was reputedly powered by “reddened mercury”.

In its final, black chapters Fishing the River of Songs reputedly supports the legends that claim Emperor Taizong killed his brother Taizu to inherit the throne. Here, however, it is intimated that the “Golden Shelf Promise” (the sealed document which validated Taizong’s claim to the throne) was filled with such horrid blasphemies that its “golden inks were placed in flame until they melted into screaming lead” and the scroll was replaced with a more palatable forgery.

As for the bizarre claims that the “honey of the hummingbirds” nevertheless corrupted the blood of Taizong’s sons, it can only be said that the text descends into almost incoherent poetry and the true meaning of whatever metaphor is being sought is perhaps lost within the archaic Chinese.

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Rift of the Mouth

This thin, ebon-covered book is a collection of thirteen meditative mantras. The character of these meditations, however, is severely disturbing to any civilized mind: They fixate upon imagery of depraved acts of violence, power, and control.

Each mantra is disparate (albeit varied) in its perverse obsession, but the common theme which joins the mantras together is that of the “Mouth” and the “Maw”. The Maw is the void from which both Truth and the turgid release of the flesh emanates. It is the gaping hole beyond the empty gulf which is the world of mortal perceptions.

The Mouth is characterized as being connected to the Maw. It is the path which cleaves its way through the barriers of the mind which lie between your voided gulf and that place beyond, releasing thereby the wisdom of the Maw. It is also the font from which such “honeyed knowledge” is spewed forth from the world.

Delving deeper into the imagery of the mantras, however, reveals another layer of truth: That there is a more direct path to the Maw. A rift. And that the “new-mooned Rift” will give “clear skies of truth” to those who find it.

The final mantra issues a chilling warning against the “name of the Maw”. 

For the name of the Maw is the Maw and the name of the Maw is its wisdom and the name of the Maw is its void and the name of the Maw is the gulf which swallows and the name of the Maw is that which destroys.

 The name (which is not given) is a shortcut by which the Maw of the Mouth can be regurgitated (or vomited) into this world; but such sudden and overwhelming truth would “sear one whose mind has not been glazed to the stars beyond one’s own”.

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Ziggurats of the Pre-Helladic Period

A fascinatingly inchoate and bizarrely unorganized survey of its titular topic. Great and particular attention is given to Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavation of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, which was essentially contemporary to the composition of this text. Its dimensions (both real and hypothetically reconstructed) are given in painstaking detail and some sense of the structure of Alexander’s text begins to become apparent as one realizes that these dimensions are being equated through complex mathematical transformations to the dimensions of other ziggurats.

This, perhaps, also explains the sharp and sudden departures of the text from its topic: While drawing complex relationships between the ziggurats of Babylon, the ziqqurats of Akkadia, and the pre-zigguratical zaqaru of the Ubaidian period, Alexander will abruptly introduce discussions of monoliths and other structures from South and Central America and even from his native Hungary.

It then becomes clear that the dimensional diatribes – which at first seem a secondary characteristic of the text, wedged between lengthy narrative descriptions of each site – are actually of the primary and utmost important to the author: And in unwinding the strange cycles of his numbers, one realizes that he is making the bold claim that all of these disparate works of stone draw their ultimate inspiration from the preternatural dimensions of the “Black Stone” which the author ultimately claims “thrusts into the heart of every building constructed by man; thrusts into the very subconscious of our modern edifices of pride and hubris”.

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Adrift in a Storm-Tossed Sky

A quaint, pocket-sized volume of poetry written in the 19th century by some metaphorical outcast of the Brontë household named Candace Hawthorne. The vast, sweeping vistas of the Scottish heaths form a faint patina of mildly amusing poetic imagery varnishing vague, groping lurches of romantic languishment.

But there is something distinctly unsettling in leafing through these competent irrelevancies, and as one reads the poems there develops an unmistakable sense of the work’s central imagery. And regardless of the order in which the poems are read, this imagery becomes inexorably clearer: Of the night sky being a completely malleable entity. That the stars we see each night are radically “repainted across that tapestry” although we believe them constant. That the only constancy is the searing, sucking, and all-consuming depth of midnight black which seeks to swallow those “dancing motes” in their “chaos waltz.”

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Azathoth and Other Horrors

Published in 1909, this collection of Edward Pickman Derby’s nightmare-lyrics was printed by the Miskatonic University Press when he was a youth of only 18 years. The forward describes Mr. Derby as “the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known. At seven he was writing verse of a somber, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. In the scant few years which have passed since those early gropings, he has flourished into a sensational talent.”

Included in this collection are the poems “Azathoth” (which occupies fully half the book), “Nemesis Rising”, “Charnel House”, “Dead But Not Gone”, and “Medusa’s Kiss”, among others. These works draw heavily upon the local legendry of Arkham, Massachusetts, and combine startling insights with verse of surprising power.

This particular copy has been annotated with extensive marginalia in a cramped hand. These notes draw copious comparisons between Derby’s work and Justin Geoffrey’s The People of the Monolith, alleging that there was a close correspondence between Derby and that notorious Baudelairean poet. The scholarship seems half-crazed, but through a composite of the two poets’ imagery it creates a strong correlation between the omni-present “gaze of the blind idiot” from Derby’s “Azathoth”, the “skipping ebon stones” that “dance across the skim-skein haze” of reality, and the “mastodonic horror” of Geoffrey. One facet of the “compound gaze” is fixed upon the “land beyond the stone” and some solace could be taken from that “plenipotent distance” if a “ladder of faith” had not been built between that land and this.

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The Broken Ouroborous of Ahtu

Although not as well known as The Cancer of the Congo – the lurid, pulp-retelling of Dame Alice Kilrea’s explorations in the Congo Free State from 1895-1909 – The Broken Ouroborus of Ahtu is an infinitely more useful volume for any serious scholar. Written by Dame Alice herself, it possesses a curiously dry and formal tone which in no way alleviates the terrifying horrors inflicted upon the indigenous population during King Leopold II’s brutal plundering of natural resources.

In 1895, she journeyed in the heart of the Congo in response to her belief that the “crawling chaos” which had been “eating at the heart of Europe” was manifesting under the jungle canopy. She describes her belief that this “infinite darkness, born from the collective subconscious of humanity or perhaps spewed down upon it from the stars above” sought nothing more than to “permeate our world like mold through a loaf of bread, until the very planet becomes a ball of viscid slime hurtling around the sun and stretching tentacles towards Mars.” Her worst fears were, apparently, confirmed when she encountered a depraved cult of individuals mutilated by Belgium atrocities who had taken up the pagan worship of an entity they referred to as Ahtu: “Those without eyes could see Ahtu. Those without ears were called by him. Those without hands were guided by his touch.”

She describes the cultists succeeding in manifesting Ahtu: “Pulsing, rising, higher already than the giants of the forest ringing it, the fifty-foot-thick column of what had been earth dominated that night. From the base of the main neck had sprouted a ring of tendrils, ruddy and golden and glittering all over with inclusions of quartz.”

Dame Alice spends the next fifteen years of her life hunting down the “cancer of the golden wyrm” throughout the Congo. Ahtu, which she describes as “but one mask of the crawling chaos”, consistently manifests itself as some form of gelatinous mass extruding golden tentacles and worshipped by the disparate Cult of the Spiraling Worm. She describes certain protective sigils from the Akumsite Empire-- a raised lidded eye glyph-- which repel spying spells and mystical surveillance. Without these sigils, her work would be quite impossible. 

Her explorations eventually lead her to Nyhargo, the “basalt-towered city” which she describes as “predating Eve herself”. There she found that a new kingdom of necromancy and cannibalism had sprung up within the ruins. Although she managed to thwart the rituals being carried out there, she seems to take small comfort from that fact. “Surgeons do not kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there is always a little left to grow and spread again… My time in the Congo has come to an end, but I fear that the work there will need to be taken up again before the stars have shifted far in the sky.”

The ultimate fate of the two-parted golden bracelet that Dame Alice claimed from the cult is vague and uncertain.

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Children of the Night and Nahua Legends

This late-19th century volume is a curious blend of archaeological surmise and mythography. The author, Rupert Mulholland, catalogues a number of curiously anachronistic sites scattered throughout the eastern portion of Central America. Each site is marked by a cluster of earthen domes, with low doorways that are uniformly sunk into the ground. From the surface, these structures are largely unremarkable, but the dwelling-places are connected by underground corridors, so that the entire village would become like an ant-bed or a system of snake holes. Mulholland also reports some evidence that other subterranean corridors might run off under the ground, perhaps emerging long distances from the village (although he was never able to find their points of exit in wider surveys).

In this, Mulholland draws heavily upon Evidences of Nahua Culture in Yucatan, despite this work apparently having been widely discredited by Professor Tussman of Sussex. Mulholland insists, however, that the linguistic inconsistencies highlighted in Tussman’s work are, in fact, evidence for an unrecorded epoch of cultural invasion among the Nahua tribes and that the legends of the Children of the Night are a reflection of that lost period of Mesoamerican history.

Of particular interest, perhaps, are the vestigial myth cycles which the author traces back to the obscure Nahua tribes which migrated to the Yucatan peninsula. These refer to the Children of the Night as being “chosen by the God of the Black Stone” and also claim that they “carry the legacy of the Isle of the Gods”. They are somehow connected to a people referred to as the Xoxul (which translates roughly as “the tribe of strangers”) and Mulholland is able to clearly delineate a myth cycle in which a “jewel” or “key” (or possibly “jewel-key”) is said to have been taken from the Xoxul and hidden away somewhere in Honduras. (The author makes some effort to correlate this legendry with tales from the Pipil tribes of El Salvador, the southern-most survivors of the Nahua migrations, but it seems that any surviving myths have become thoroughly muddled by a transmigration of Mayan cultural influences.)

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Collected Sermons of the Float'd Tongue

This is a handwritten volume purportedly presenting the “true words” which were spoken by the “many mouths of the Float’d Tongue”. The source of these sermons appears to have been the Misión Santa Maria de la Cabeza, located north of the Mission de Nuestra Senora de Loreto Concho, in Baja California. Starting in 1821, the mission’s padres seem to have formed some form of glossolalia cult, albeit with the curious variance that they were reputedly “speaking without tongues”. Rather, the “breath of their voice stirred the robes which fell about them”.

An initial religious fervor surrounding the incidents of glossolalia appears to have spurred a spike of local interest, which is accompanied by congratulations from the Spanish leadership for so effectively appealing to the local mestizos. The mestizos began to work hard, obey local authorities, stop drinking and having sex, and attend Mass daily. A letter notes the grim and dark countenances of the local mestizos, but the padres assure the Spanish leadership that all power over the mestizos is being exercised for their own benefit.

The leadership of the cult rapidly grows and appears to have even incorporated some of the indigenous people. The “sweet honey” of the “padre’s voice” is consumed by many and recorded sermons are attributed to over a dozen people.

Shortly thereafter, however, the attributions of the sermons vanish from the text. Instead, it refers only to the “Float’d Tongue”. Around this same time, the corporal punishments used to enforce the native population’s conversion to Catholicism are radically increased so that “their wounds might speak through fresh-slit lips”.

According to attached historical notes written in a much later hand, the mission was wiped out by a military action in 1825 and razed to the ground. Reputedly all official records of the mission were destroyed. 

It is possible that members of the mission (and possibly the cult as well) escaped its destruction via secret, underground tunnels which had been built beneath the iglesias. That could explain the survival of this volume, assuming that it isn’t simply an elaborate hoax.

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The Cradle in The Ocean

Paul Bunyan’s parents anchored his cradle in the ocean.

They anchored his cradle because he was too large for the house.

Paul’s size was the cause. His shackling the effect.

Paul rocked his cradle.

Paul’s cradle rocked.

Rocking was the cause. Rocking was the effect.

The paradox of self-causality remains until one sees each rocking for itself.

Because the cradle rocked, the ocean was stirred.

Stirred to a tidal wave.

A wave which wiped away the house. The parents. All that they had seen.

A wave which was the effect of all that it destroyed.

The cradle will rock. The cradle will fall. The cradle remains unfelled.

A thing too large to be contained by mortal structure.

Each jostling of mortal life.

Unconstrained. Unrestrained.

Unfathomed.

A seemingly nonsensical, but deeply disturbing, children’s book which primarily recounts bizarre tales of the folk hero Paul Bunyan.

In another of the stories (recounted in broken prose) Paul wrestles with the Shepherd Death, whose scythe Tagh-Clatur is repeatedly described by the epithet “sly-angled”. The sly-angled scythe eventually cuts Paul down, leaving behind a livid red mark “at the heart of a web of crimson” which spreads across Paul’s chest.

The theme of cause-and-effect coupled to oceanic imagery, as established in the book’s epigram, is constantly repeated throughout the collection, coupled to another set of imagery revolving around the surface of the ocean being a “wall” and that, beyond this wall, there lies an imprisoned a lying behemoth (referred to as both the “Prisoner” and the “Liar”).

The Liar features most prominently in the story “The Saffron Bee”, in which Paul seeks to steal honey from a colony of giant bees whose hive is as big as a mountain in the hope that he can use the honey as a bribe to free the Liar. But “the Liar is held by the lie of false history; of causality that cannot be” and though Paul gains the honey, he cannot find the gaoler.

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Fragments of Bal-Sagoth

This slim, peculiar volume purports to be “a dream woven from the true and factual accounts of many diverse peoples of the world”, but it is rather difficult to separate what is meant to be scholarship from fancy. It is perhaps notable that the author’s name has been savagely crossed out on every page on which it would normally appear with a thick, dark ink, making its recovery utterly impossible. The volume’s only other distinguishing mark is an imprimatur placing its publication in Shanghai.

The book claims that the “Isle of the Gods”, where “fabled Bal-Sagoth rested in her nest of milk-white streets”, is a place unseated from the normal constraints of geography. Often it is found drifting through the depths of the Atlantic, but other accounts reputedly place it along the Coast or Arabia or “lost in the mists that drift through the dimmed tides of Nippon’s Sea”.

Deep beneath Bal-Sagoth, “in twisted warrens spun from serpent’s coils”, lies the Temple of Shadows. There is held the worship of Gol-Goroth “upon an altar of blood and black obsidian” where “youths and maidens die at the waxing and waning, the rising and the setting of each moon.” A human heart “forever throbs” upon that altar, which is “the pinion pinnacle upon the monolith which drives the spike, which is the Bridge of Bal-Sagoth, the Bridge of Gol-Goroth”. In this “court of horrors”, the figure of a jester death named Gothan recurs again and again in the fragments of verse and poetry.

The city itself, from which “the hundred hidden eyes of Bal-Sagoth” peep forth, is described as shimmering silk. A place stirring strange and arcane dreams. A thing of towering battlements thrust through fleecy clouds, dwarfing the hallowed scope of Rome, Damascus, and Byzantium, even as the proud civilization of Bal-Sagoth “o’erreaches them in the saga of years”.

It is said that Bal-Sagoth once ruled over the Isles of Gol-Goroth: A great empire which spread across “this and more than seven seas”. But the age of empire came to an end. The islands sank and vanished with their cities and people, until only Bal-Sagoth itself remained, its galleys rotting in their wharves for lack of ports to sail to.

In the final, darkened days of Bal-Sagoth – when “the touch of Gol-Goroth had grown light upon his city” – the Isle of Gods became besieged by red-skinned savages; a “tribe of strangers” who sailed from “just this side of the horizon” on fearsome war-canoes. Bal-Sagoth was consumed in the flames of its own iniquity, and the invaders carried off “not only the altars and jewels of Gol-Goroth, but his favor as well”. In many ways this is the closing image of the Fragments of Bal-Sagoth, although it lies in a poem only halfway through its length: “Let the skin of blood ride o’er the sun, for above the sky shall they journey upon the wings that bear them, carried as they shall be by the Sons of Gol-Goroth; their legacies forever shielded by the Daughters of the Black Stone”.

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The Gaze of Azathoth

Bound in black, brain-tanned leather, this book tells the tale of a nameless man (who is also sometimes described as “faceless”) who lives amidst the “dying lights” of the end of days. Blessed with the “thrice-cursed immortality” this man nevertheless feels as if a creeping doom has crept into his bones. His dreams are slowly filled by the recurring image of a great and terrible Eye which “gazes down upon the world”, and he is disturbed to find that many others among his friends and acquaintances have begun to share these dreams.

At last this “gnawing Eye” – belonging to the “dread amorphity of Azathoth” – manifests itself and its horrible gaze is “turned upon the last, burning days of his twilit world”.

Rather than embracing or accepting the doom of his world, however, the man seeks an escape. He finds it in the “flesh of Yog-Sothoth”, creating a gate which allows him to escape to another world.

Unfortunately, the “gaze of Azathoth” had become “locked upon him” through the “barbs which bear the runes of Nyarlathotep”, and the Eye follows him to the new world and turns its destructive force upon it. The man escapes again, using the same gate as before. And, once again, the Eye pursues him.

The man skips from one world to the next, watching as the stars he had doomed wink out one by one from the many skies above him until his nights are marked only by a “haze of unseen red”. But still he runs, carrying with him the curse of Azathoth’s gaze.

At the end of the story he makes the decision to stop running and throws himself prostrate upon the ground. But as he does so, he finds that he has landed “at the feet of the Herald”, who reveals to him a great truth: That the worlds he has left in his wake have not been burdened with destruction, for as long as Azathoth’s gaze is fixed upon the man, he will carry that destruction away with him and spare the worlds behind.

The Herald’s words, however, come too late, for the mind of the man has been consumed by his “gibbering madness”. And neither he nor any of the worlds he has saved will ever know his sacrifice.

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Geheimes Mysterium von Asien

Professor Gottfried Mulder was a friend and colleague of Friedrich von Junzt. According to Geheimes Mysterium von Asien (Secret Mysteries of Asia; published 1847, although this is a copy of the American version pirated in 1849 as Secret Mysteries of Asia, with a Commentary on the Ghorl Nigral), Mulder accompanied Junzt on a journey to Asia in 1818-19 and, many years later, served as the publisher of Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Following Junzt’s death, Mulder fled to Leipzig and used hypnotic therapy to recover his memories of the Asian journey.

Most particularly, Mulder recalls Junzt seeking a “cold and barren plateau” lost somewhere deep in the heart of the continent. Atop that plateau (or perhaps perched upon its side), Junzt led them to the Monastery of Yian-Ho. Mulder describes the approach to the monastery as strange and disconcerting: He was, himself, struck by a constant impression that the blasted wilderness which surrounded the monastery was, in fact, filled with ghostly buildings of which he could only catch half-glimpses. (But which, in later conversations, Junzt was able to describe in rapt detail.)

In a passage which is heavily annotated in this copy, Junzt and Mulder present themselves before the leader of the monastery, the “High Priest Not to Be Named”. (Mulder claims that this High Priest is, in fact, the legendary Black Pharaoh of prehistoric Egypt from whose forehead the Eye of Ra was ripped.) Junzt petitions the High Priest, addressing him by numerous titles including the “Herald of Azathoth” and “Mouth of the Crawling Chaos”, requesting access to the Ghorl Nigral, the Book of Night which was reputedly “written under the silvered light of alien stars” and of which only a single copy supposedly exists in the world.

Although both Mulder and Junzt gazed upon its pages of “black-upon-black script”, Mulder reports remembering little or nothing of its contents. The material reproduced within the Geheimes Mysterium von Asien derives almost entirely from the detailed discussions Mulder had with Junzt regarding the contents of the book, all of which were uncannily recalled during Mulder’s hypnotic therapies.

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The Last of the First: The Ends of Occult Dynasties

As the title suggests, this 1902 historical survey by H.L. Persig focuses on the final days of so-called “occult dynasties”, the various mechanisms by which their magical potencies become diluted or lost, and how their bodies of knowledge disintegrate and disperse in the wake of their destruction. A few pertinent examples:

Hyksos Dynasts. The Hyksos ruled Lower Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, deriving their power from powerful rituals performed in the temples and catacombs of Thebes. During a “turning of the constellations”, Ahmose I drove the Hyksos out of Thebes and then used their wealth to embark on massive construction projects which restored the glory of the Egyptian Empire. Near the end of his life, the conquering pharaoh constructed the Pyramid of Ahmose in the necropolis of Abydos (which is said to be congruent to the rifts of the Dreamlands). Although Persig carefully delineates historical records indicating that Ahmose I filled the pyramid with the dark lore he had accumulated from the Hyksos, the expedition of Arthur Mace and Charles Trick Currelly in 1899 suggests that the pyramid consisted only of a limestone casing filled with sand and rubble.

Asshurbanipal. Asshurbanipal was the last King of Assyria. He sent forth scholars to collect texts and lore from across the Empire and Persig suggests that, contrary to the common dating, his reign was preternaturally long (on the order of nearly two hundred years) with the “annals of his kingdom being stretched by the Fire of Asshurbanipal, that blasphemous ruby which the King held in his right hand”. The Fire of Asshurbanipal was stolen upon his death (or possibly during the civil wars which followed close on its heels) and the Babylonians overran the broken remnants of the Assyrian Empire only 11 years later.

Persig also invests a great deal of time analyzing the Fragments of Bal-Sagoth, which he maintains were produced by Asshurbanipal (or perhaps his predecessors) to create a sort of “divine right” for his imperial line. However, the Fragments also appear to have created a great deal of irreparable confusion around the identity of the cult figure at the center of Asshurbanipal’s worship: Its identity is variously given, possibly as the result of bad translations, as Gol-Goroth, Groth-Golka, or the “Fisher from Beyond”. It is unclear whether these are separate figures; if Groth-Golka and Gol-Goroth are one and the same; or if Groth-Golka (“or perhaps multiple Groth-Golkas”) are servitors of Gol-Goroth. (The name “Fisher from Beyond” is variously applied to all of these things.)

Amorian Dynasty. The Amorian Dynasty initiated the Second Iconoclasm of the Byzantine Empire, but the the author claims that its emperors maintained “dark crèches” of blasphemous icons, many “meteor-forged” (or perhaps “meteor-found”). These icons were lost during the fall of the Amorian dynasty, although it is rumored that the mad monk-mage Santabarenos secreted them away.

Kingdom of Kush. During the latter days of the Kingdom of Kush, after its capital had been moved to Meroe, the nation became ensnared by a strange cult that “sought the Black Stone”. In the 4th century AD, the kingdom was invaded by King Ezana of Axum. Persig claims that Ezana’s goal was to capture the secret lore of the Kushite cults in order to strengthen his own dynasty. King Ezana himself had powerful magic, particularly his lidded-eye glyphs, which warded off the magical surveillance which the Kings of Kush relied on to win battles.

Merovingian Bloodline. The Merovingians held the throne of France through the rite of their supposedly magical bloodline. Persig maintains, however, that, at least in their final days, they were mere puppets for the Council of Mayors (who were, in fact, sorcerers holding what would later become the lost crèche icons of Byzantium). Childeric III, the last of the Merovingian kings of France, was kept in utter seclusion except for one day a year. The Merovingian’s power was broken in 752 AD when Pope Zachary dethroned Childeric and stripped him of his royal rights and magical powers by cutting his hair.

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Seven Masks

Apocryphally ascribed to Ptolemy, the text of the Seven Masks appears to originate several hundred years after his life and anachronistically refers to events Ptolemy could not possibly have known. No complete text is known to exist in the modern world (the last complete text having been defaced by the Vatican in 1436), but this 1917 popular edition from Golden Goblin Press attempts to reconstruct a complete text from various sources. Unfortunately, the effort is somewhat marred by the questionable translation and the unlabeled efforts made to complete unfinished tales.

The bulk of Seven Masks is made up of biographical sketches, purporting to be historical in nature despite their slow departure from anything resembling the realistic (or even the human). As the sketches disintegrate into an increasingly surreal panoply, however, there is a growing implication that all of these tales are somehow seeking to describe the same individual.

Black Pharaoh. Nephren-Ka was the last Pharaoh of the Third Dynasty. He is said to have “eaten out the heart” of the Cults of Bast and used them as a seed by which he rose to power and, subsequently, corrupted the worship of all the Egyptian Gods. Named as the “Black Pharaoh”, all references to Nephren-Ka and his cult were wiped out by his successor.

Thing in the Yellow Mask. A tale of how Leng Bao, a fabled general of the orient, became separated from his army during the invasion of Yi Province. On a strange, mist-shrouded plateau Leng Bao found a monastery which was occupied by a sole figure clothed in yellow silk and wearing a yellow mask. Although he spent only a fortnight within the monastery questioning the Thing in the Yellow Mask, when Leng Bao left the plateau he discovered that many years had passed and that his men had named the plateau in his honor.

Pale Death. A shapeshifting harbinger. The Pale Death can appear in many forms, but always possesses a pale-grey complexion or even albino features.

Akousmatikoi Proof. Allegedly discovered by Pythagoras and used by certain degenerate branches of the Pythagoreans, it is said that to truly understand this proof is to gaze upon a Mask. A man named Aniolowski is said to have been the first to prove the Akousmatikoi Proof, although the text oddly seems to imply that he has done so in the future.

Black Wind. Here the Mask manifests as a devastating storm which sweeps down from the Mountain of Black Wind, which lies somewhere deep in Africa. The whispers of the Mask sweep forth from that mountain and howl through mortal ears.

Crawling Mist. And now the Mask infects your dreams, taking the form of a thick and pungent mist which clings to the edges of your nightly visions. Over the course of subsequent nights, the mist will crawl inexorably closer to the dreamer.

Empress in Red. Finally, the Empress in Red. Who is one figure in history and yet many. A beautiful and powerful woman with insensate sway over those who enter her presence, her path is tracked through centuries of history as paramour and priestess, lover and goddess. There are even intimations to be found here that she is the true author of the text.

Benefits of Skimming
Benefits of Poring Over
Particularly Important Props

Testament of the Dripping Mouths' Emanates (Trammel's Testament)

Walker’s network:

Each dealer handles their own street level. Walker will ensure that anyone who talks is dealt with. Walker knows best...

Territory handled by Walker! Street value is at $22 a vial. Walker selling bulk at Hollywood plaza.

Echavarria's Lie

It is here that my chapter begins and the name of Samson Trammel shall echo down the ages. This is my testament. The documented proof of my journey will lay the foundations of the next era of humanity. For under my command and the command of that which I serve all will come to know the true meaning of power. 

They will come to see the truth even as I have seen the truth, in the cry of a child beaten, in the eye of an animal as it leaves this mortal coil, in the eye of my lover as I have my fill… For I am the voice, I am the mouth of Nyarlathotep. No human who has ever lived has had a power as great as mine. I am the Black Pharaoh, avatar of the Crawling Chaos, herald of the God with a Thousand Forms, messenger of the messenger of the Outer Gods! All shall know my name and it shall live on for eons!

It has come to pass that I am the mouth which feeds the world. Echavarria is gone like teeth plucked from a jawbone. Echavarria has paid his piper, his lies his undoing. He will be but a footnote in my story, yet it was he who set us on the true path, when he intended to deceive us…

Echavarria lied, not the worst of his vices I’ll grant. Amongst the death, the abuse, the rage, the untrammeled ambition, he lied to us, his followers. And like simple lambs we listened and drowned in the lies. His greatest lie, like a snake coiled around our very core, was our belief that Gol-Goroth guided our hands and mouths in his work. Like the thick sinuous length of an oiled serpent, it wrapped around us, his followers, choking us and blinding us.

It seems fitting that at the start of this testament I finally dispel the myth propagated by Ramon Echavarria and end his eternal laughter at us, the lambs, so blind. I and I alone have the power to share the truth. He tried to destroy us with his lies but I shall prove myself greater than him with the strength of truth. Gol-Goroth never was the focus of his energies! Echavarria’s force is spent! His legacy is undone! Let all who read this know that Samson Trammel, through mouth wide open, shouted the truth and let it scour the seas and burn the lands! All shall tremble before me! None shall know the depth of my power!

The LA Nectar Operation

Vial contents-- cloudy liquid, pungent mossy smell. Our vials have the mark of the L. A. Roarch glassworks.

Haitians have been pushing their own ‘nectar’, a form of amphetamine. Dealers told to stomp this out with whatever force necessary- Walker to handle the details.

Dealers do NOT know of the true nature of the Nectar. Walker has heard them discuss the Black Man but they assume we are working for an African paymaster. The African plants I am so fond of helped ‘cultivate’ the lie!

Nectar Production - Valletta 1934

[a table which shows that Nectar production spikes on February 13, 1934]

The Black Man

He revealed himself to me first in my dreams. I stood before a pyramid in Egypt. The sun’s rays beat down on my skin. Before me were arrayed thousands of warriors, hundreds of thousands of slaves, awaiting the Pharaoh’s every word, ready to die at his slightest whim. The gems and rubies of a thousand continents glittered, and furs and gold and frankincense and myrrh and every luxury or treasure one could imagine in quantities unimaginable. But this was no shallow princeling: he had books, a wealth of occult knowledge and forbidden lore from a hundred mad sages, and they were well-thumbed. 

I prostrated myself before him in awe. But he raised me up and kissed me on both cheeks in the French style, and presented me before all his slaves as his herald, his heir and-- one day, if I were to prove worthy-- his equal. I professed that I was undeserving of such an honor. He said he would teach me. 

His wet mouth was slippery with the truth as it spilled forth. His was a vaulted past stretching far past the sands of the ancient Land of the Nile. He was a tall man clad in Black, his face always in shadow, his features unclear to me. He spoke to me, his melodious voice washed over me, and I was reborn.

He spoke to me for many days, the sun rising and falling like empires, and he made revelations that I had long suspected. He spoke to me, and I know that Ramon had been lying to me, to us all. 

He said that he had waited for long years for someone he could entrust with his sigil, the ability to speak in his holy Name. He told me that my time had finally come, that I was to ascend. I was to become the sole and supreme leader of our movement and all would fall on bended knee and adore me. I would show my new followers the way. The way to venerate the Black Man. And he in turn would shower us with fortune and rewards that are long overdue.

His mouths would be the means by which we would manifest his influence and we in turn could reap the secretions from those most holy orifices and there would be a boon like we had never imagined. We would be his children and we would inherit all...

Increasing the Yield of Emanates from The Most Holy Orifices of Nyarlathotep

Ramon spoke of sacrifice, saying that in magic the greater the sacrifice, the greater the reward. I think he intended to demonstrate that, but he had no conception of the true power that could be achieved with the ultimate sacrifice. But the Mouths whisper to me now and they tell me that, in Malta, Montgomery Donovan understands this with the bitter black dregs of wisdom.

And the Nectar flows like a river of tears...

Letters from JB, Part One

Trammel-

We are close now! So very close! What we are creating, it will be amazing! It will be a new experience to rival that of Nectar’s. It will be worth the wait. You will see. Do not forget that what Cristobal de la Luz and I have accomplished has never been done, not by you nor Ramon, not in Malta or Los Angeles or Bangkok. Only we in Mexico City have accomplished this! We have done this thing for Our God so that the Nectar may flow freely from the great Mouths! Nectar distribution will return to its original rates once we’ve prepared our album.

--JB

T-

The recordings continue and soon we will have our album. You will see then. You and your god will see. We have had setbacks, yes. But Cristobal de la Luz and I know what we are doing. We understand the situation in Mexico City. We are here and we know what we are doing. You press us for details, but would you truly understand them? Have you told us the full details of what you are doing? Would you think well of us if we were to question your truths as you are questioning ours? 

We have not lost sight of why we are here. We have given it great thought and come to conclusions about ourselves, our operations, our goals, and the god. We have done new things, true things, and we continue to explore and to learn the truth, even when others might want to believe old lies.

--JB

Our Friends In Bangkok

Trammel--

When dealing with any entity of great power, it is essential to be fully aware of the nature of that entity. To fail to do this, whether one wishes to worship or to destroy that entity, is to court disaster. This is true of any supposed god-- why else do you think there have been vast libraries devoted to exploring the nature of any acknowledged deity you care to name? Priests, no less than scholars and sages, have long understood this. 

The same is true for our god. We operate in the darkness of ignorance when it is absolutely critical to know the metaphysical nature of what we venerate. You claim that the Thing with a Thousand Mouths has revealed itself to you as Nyarlathotep. Samson, I tell you this: you are like as not to be wrong in your conclusion. I have spent years tracking down works both common and obscure, sparing no expenses and no resources, and all of my researches simply do not reveal any obvious identity for the deity we both worship. I hope you are as disturbed by this reality as I, and that you can avoid retreating from it into juvenile fantasies. 

Though we disagree in this matter, still I reach out my hand to you in kindness. Samson, I extend the invitation to you, and indeed to any of your followers, though I am certain you will not accept it, to fight in our rites in Bangkok.

You may instruct your disciples to present themselves at the Fragrant Honey Shop in the Phra Nakron, saying to the doorman “I have come to join with the circle of excess.”

--Savitree Sirikhan

Blasphemer! How dare she sully His Holy Name with her unworthy hand!

Letters From JB, Part Two

Dear Mr. Trammel--

We have been considering the power that comes from a Mouth’s song. If our merely human mouths have the power to soothe the savage beast with our paltry song, how much more potent would this be! What we could learn! For as Echavarria said, the voice of a great Mouth may have the power to enchant or enlighten!

--JB

Dear Mr. Trammel--

Everything is in order! Thank you for your trust in us! I promise you that we shall not let you down! The great Mouth’s song shall ring out!

We have made our first record! I think you will find it everything we have hoped for. Cristobal and I are very proud of it. We will send it by way of Bangkok.

We’re switching post office boxes-- from now on please send messages to P. O. Box 1629. 

--JB

Trammel--

I am very glad you like the record. Is it not everything I have promised? And more?

This is something that has never before been done! We have found a new way to harness Our God’s power! And the effect in combination with Nectar is most potent! 

But we shall go further. We shall make a whole album!

--JB

Trammel--

We are indeed working on our next recording. Cristobal de la Luz works hard every day on this, and I have everything under control. 

We are very excited-- as I hope you are also-- about the profound possibilities of new songs!

--JB

Trammel--

The record is taking longer than we expected. But do not fear. We will have it done soon. You will be very pleased with the results. I promise. 

--JB

Mr. Trammel--

Yes, I am profoundly grateful to you. Yes, I know you chose me above all others to start our operations here in Mexico City. I know we are tasked with maintaining operations here and ultimately making sure the Nectar flows throughout North and South America. I have not forgotten this. Believe me, please, I have not forgotten it.

Yes, production levels are down, but this will be fixed as soon as the new recording is done. You have heard already what we have achieved! We can do so much more! All we need is a little more time. Please be patient. I swear to you you will not be disappointed.

--JB

Trammel--

We have had some setbacks, but I know now we are on the right track. Our new album will change everything!

You will see-- no, you will hear it for yourself! de la Luz and I do what we do for Our God. Everything will change once the album is done. Everything.

--JB

Particularly Important Props

Savitree's Library

Partially Reconstructed Copy of the 1924 Ritual

Savitree’s journals-- the recordings of her private thoughts over the past decade-- turn time and time again to the night of the ritual Echavarria performed in Los Angeles in 1924. It was a time of confusion and horror for her, extended by the frenzied flight from Los Angeles to Bangkok which immediately followed and deepened by her belief immediately prior to the ritual that it was the culmination of something wonderful and the opening of a new chapter in her life. Instead, the book of her life was ripped away from her and burned by “selfish men.”

More important than the immediate trauma of what happened was the fact that the events of that night upturned her entire view of life:

Ramon had been the beginning and the end of my ouroboros. He was the ideal of what I thought all men and women should aspire to be. I believed there was a purity in his limitless drive for power. Now I realize that he was a fool. A careless man. A child playing with matches in a field of tinder.

Savitree concluded that Ramon had made dangerous mistakes:

He stood in communion with the Great Entity. And there was power there. And truths that could transform us into something more than the meager things we are. But to the Great Old Ones we are like ants scattering from an ant-pile. They will not make us one of Them. They will not make us king among men. When we serve, we serve purposes we do not understand and that do not care for us at all. It would have been better if the Thing with a Thousand Mouths had never been summoned at all.

Even from her earliest journal entries, it’s clear that Savitree suspected that Echavarria knew more of the “God of the Black Stone” than he shared with Savitree or her fellow cultists. Her only real key to Echavarria’s secret knowledge, especially in those early days immediately after August 1924, was the ritual itself.

Unfortunately, the ritual proved as obscure as the entity at its center. Savitree quickly exhausted the common tomes of such lore and found nothing. It seemed clear that the goal had been to summon (or manifest) Echavarria’s God, but there were endless complications upon the basic theme which baffled Savitree’s efforts to reconstruct the ritual.

In the afternoon before the ritual had been performed, for example, Savitree had walked around Echavarria’s farm, meditating to calm her excitement. She saw that, in addition to the preparations being made in the barn, Echavarria had also placed a circle of stones around the barn with various occult symbols. From what she could later recall of these symbols, they were clearly linked to the inner ritual and were designed in order to control or contain some force. But only in part: there was some other function, connected to the inner ritual, which escaped her understanding.

There was also the oddity of Lev Aarons:

Why should he have been chosen? Was it his relationship with Ayers? Ayers was a member of the Inner Circle, yes, but could that favor have spoken so loudly to Ramon? And yet, at the moment of our greatest triumphs, Lev Aarons was singled out above all and Echavarria’s spell placed upon him.

Even more puzzling, however, was the function the spell placed on Lev Aarons had to the rest of Echavarria’s ritual. It was not connected in any way to the rites of summoning which had filled the barn with the screams of sacrifices.

The readings from the secret book of the Key of Solomon, combined with the records that Braunlich brought back from the Isle of Pillars, at least serve to confirm that the Thing with a Thousand Mouths is, in fact, at the center of the ritual. Echavarria sought to summon a liar and he concealed much, but it seems he was not lying to us completely.

In 1930, Savitree begins studying the Revelations of Dagon. Shortly thereafter, she appears to have become convinced that the Prisoner of Dagon, who is referenced throughout the Revelations, is a strong candidate for the true identity of what she now calls the Liar From Beyond.

But when she attempts to apply that conclusion to her reconstruction of Echavarria’s ritual, she is immediately frustrated:

The Revelations are filled with rites of communion and summoning for the Prisoner. But they bear no resemblance to Echavarria’s rite! I feel as if the mouths have crawled inside my skull! My brain is consumed with fire! There is truth here. I know there is truth here. But it slips like rotten blood through the fingers. What is the Liar he sought to venerate? And what means of veneration did he seek?

Frustrated again, there is a gap of nearly half a year in Savitree’s work on the ritual. But she returns to it again from time to time thereafter, revisiting it like a familiar friend; a puzzle that she turns over in her hands again and again in the hope that some new combination of patterns will reveal itself to her eyes.

 

Isle of Pillars (1926)

Following the trail of strange iconography in the Jiangzi Province of China, Savitree discovered a strange account recorded by shipwrecked survivors of the Battle of Lake Poyang in 1363 AD. Their ship was sunk during the third day of battle and they washed ashore on an island. Unfortunately, the island became a no man’s land during the Ming’s naval siege of the Han Fleet. The siege lasted for more than a month, during which the survivors explored the eldritch island thoroughly in an effort to survive.

Of particular note to Savitree were the strange stone pillars which the survivors said were scattered in seemingly random locations around the island, with a great concentration in a “field of pillars” near the center of the island. The survivors learned to use them for navigation (the island proving quite resistant to navigation), and they recorded some of the symbols that were carved into the pillars (allowing them, with practice, to recognize specific pillars).

Savitree noticed strong correspondences between these symbols and symbols she had seen during Echavarria’s ritual in 1924. She dispatched Carsten Braunlich to track down the island in 1926.

Braunlich fully recorded the symbology of the pillars, creating a detailed survey map of the entire island. This record appears to have contributed significantly to Savitree’s attempts to reconstruct the 1924 ritual.

In addition to the pillars, however, Braunlich’s team found petrified mouths on trees all over the island. He also recorded the archaeological remains of a burned structure, possibly a monastery of some kind, which he tentatively dated to the 8th century AD.

According to Braunlich’s reports, several of his workers were killed by wild animals on the island in attacks that left them “partially gnawed.” In one instance, a worker claimed to have entered a tent and seen a “bodiless hand” that was eating the face of another worker.

 

The Black Stone (1927)

Ramon Echavarria often referred to the Great Entity which spoke through its Many Mouths as the “God of the Black Stone.” While Braunlich was on an expedition to China in 1926, Savitree finally found a reference to the Black Stone in Otto Dostmann’s Remnants of Lost Empires. Dostmann places the Black Stone in Hungary, but he dismisses it as being relatively modern, a remnant of the Hunnish invasion possibly erected to commemorate a victory of Attilla over the Goths.

With the Black Stone possibly located, however, Savitree is able to track down references to it in passages copied from the Dusseldorf edition of the Unaussprechlihen Kulten. The author, von Junzt, does not devote much space to it-- the bulk of his work concerned cults and objects of dark worship which were still active in the 19th century, and it seems that the Black Stone represents some order or being lost and forgotten centuries ago. Von Junzt dismisses Dostmann’s “amateurish theory” regarding the Stone, and refers to the Black Stone as “one of the keys” (a phrase whose meaning is occluded).

Savitree was unable to immediately afford the costs of a fresh expedition when Braunlich returned from China, but in the autumn of 1927 she dispatched him to Hungary.

The expedition, however, was unsatisfactory. Braunlich made precise measurements of the Black Stone, but his exploratory digs in the area turned up nothing of interest. He was able to collect bits of strange folklore from the nearest village (Stregoicavar), describing dark and ominous events which the Stone was variously associated with. There were also references to a local trickster figure referred to as “the Fisher from Outside,” who is also associated with the Black Stone.

The latter appellation was of great interest to Savitree because it was another of the titles Echavarria used. She was frustrated, however, because she could not draw any connection between the mythology of the Stone and the Great Entity they worshipped in Los Angeles: There were no references in Hungary to mouths or nectar. And there was a certain desperation to her research.

“I am frightened that the ritual in 1924 may have violated the first principle of the occult: do not call up that which you cannot put down. We have invited some mysterious entity to lurk within the bowels of the earth for purposes we know not what. I must embrace the Nectar, for without its wealth I would not be able to continue my work with Braunlich, and it gives me the strength to continue these labors deep into the night. But I will seek a different flavor. I have found, through accident and experimentation, that Nectar fed on victims of violence in an environment of sadism and barbarity makes the user violent, even when they are no longer using it. I fear what the standard flavor of Nectar may do. Better to be certainly cruel than a slave to the God whose Will I do not understand.”

Braunlich’s report describes the Stone as such: “Octagonal in shape. Sixteen feet in height. About a foot and a half thick. Signs that it had once been polished, but surface now marred as if efforts had been made to demolish it.” He was utterly baffled by the substance of the monolith, which he described as “behaving oddly translucent”, but he does record a number of strange characters written in lines which spiral up the monolith, although those too have been heavily damaged. Savitree was unable to relate them to any of the symbols Echavarria used.

 

Tunguska Crater (1927)

Among Savitree’s earliest research notes in the spring of 1925 are references to a legend originating in Ptolemaic Egypt regarding the birth of a volcano. A “mouth of the earth” got into an argument with a farmer or goat-herder (depending on the version of the story). The topic of the argument varies considerably, but in each case the “mouth of the earth” loses the argument and, in a fury, explodes.

Savitree eventually discounted the Ptolemaic origin of the story as a later accretion designed to give the story a sense of antiquity. She instead tracked the story to a period at least two centuries after the death of Cleopatra VII, and in those earliest versions of the story she found even stronger iconography which caused her to believe that the “mouth of the earth” was almost certainly a manifestation of the “many mouths” (Echavarria’s Gol-Goroth).

What she couldn’t do, unfortunately, was assign a location to the story: the explosion of the Mouth was said to have created a volcano, but there are no volcanoes in Egypt. “Is it possible the myth is not Egyptian at all?” she wrote at one point. “Did it transition from some neighboring nation?” These lines of research, unfortunately, also proved fruitless.

She instead turned her attention to the massive explosion which “ripped the Mouth apart and buried it at once, so that its voice might be stilled and it would shift no more” (as one version of the story, translated from the Arabic, put it). Searching for similarly apocalyptic explosions, she eventually turned her attention to the Tunguska event of 1908. She became increasingly convinced that this explosion could have been caused by the destruction of a Mouth (although this simultaneously fed into her paranoia regarding the dangers of venerating an unknown entity).

By mid-1926 she had entered into a correspondence with a Russian mineralogist named Leonid Kulik, who she had learned was planning an expedition to the Tunguska region. Kulik was convinced that the Tunguska event had been caused by a meteoric impact, but Savitree was able to convince him to allow Braunlich and his team of ethnologists to join the expedition in order to facilitate communication with the isolated population of the Tunguska region.

Braunlich’s true goal, however, was to search for mouth-sign. On a 1921 expedition to the basin of the Podkamennaya River, Kulik had observed thousands of square kilometers of trees which had been flattened by the explosion. The scope of the incident suggested an “unconstrained” version of the explosion described in the Egyptian myths, and if that was the case Savitree thought it likely that Braunlich would be able to find petrified mouths on the fallen trees of Tunguska, as he had found in China the year before.

The reports Braunlich sent back from the 1927 expedition, however, made it clear that there was no mouth-sign to be found. The local Evenki hunters proved obstinately reluctant. They apparently believed that the blast had been a visitation from the god Ogdy and that the land was now cursed. Ogdy’s “shout” originally interested Braunlich, but he eventually dismissed the claims as local superstition.

After several false starts, Braunlich’s ethologists were able to convince a local Evenki guide to lead Kulik and the rest of the team into the interior of the blast zone. But once there, a significant rift opened up between Kulik’s and Braunlich’s teams. Kulik and his men were becoming strangely secretive, and they were once witnessed entering a cave complex which Braunlich’s team was unable to approach due to seemingly paranoid territoriality. There were also unreliable reports that Kulik’s team may have been removing material from the cave complex.

It was around this time that the disappearances began. No bodies were found and, in several cases, it appeared that the missing persons had simply wandered off into the snow. Kulik thought that some sort of “hypothermic paradoxical undressing” was to blame but Braunlich was skeptical. Hal Becker, Braunlich’s head of security, eventually captured a strange Old Man patrolling the area. Becker was convinced that the Old Man was responsible for the murders and found his claims to be a surviving member of a 1908 expedition to the area to be ludicrous.

Braunlich met privately with the Old Man for a little over half an hour. At the end of that time, Braunlich came stumbling out of the tent they were holding the Old Man in. Several members of the team claim that he was mumbling about a “Black Thing.” Braunlich apparently collected several firearms and left camp. His body was found the next morning, crushed between two of the fallen trees. During the night, the Old Man had somehow escaped. Becker mounted a search for him that ultimately proved unsuccessful (although some of the searchers reported “strange luminosities emanating from the direction of Lake Cheko”).

 

The Oracles of Sebek

According to Savitree’s research, the Oracles of Sebek were recovered from the Temple of Montu by Fernand de la Roque during his expedition to Karnak in 1925.

The presence of Sebek imagery in the Temple of Montu is anomalous, but Savitree’s scholarship draws a sharp association between the iconography of the crocodile-headed Sebek and the hawk- or bull-headed Montu. From this, she draws the conclusion of a secret order within both priesthoods that “listened to the whispers of the unseen mouth.”

This immediately arrests her attention and she draws upon disparate sources in tracking the “secret halls of Karnak.” When she becomes aware of the oracles in 1926, she hires a man named Carsten Braunlich to secure them from de la Roque.

Providing her own translations of key passages from the Oracles (based on theories regarding how the secret priesthood encoded true meaning within obscure texts), Savitree was drawn to key passages concerning the “binding of the angles of Tagh-Clatur.” Extremely complicated stellar cartography is used to indicate two precise points in “mirrored time.” Each is a period of 117 years in which specific rites (not detailed within the Oracles) must be performed at a “sacred isle” whose location is given in relation to “the lake of starfall” (which is also referred to as “the throbbing worldheart”).

Savitree was unable to identify the periods of time or the locations indicated in the text and she appeared to eventually lose interest in the Oracles around 1929.

 

Hang Maden (1929)

In 1927, Savitree began a correspondence with Frederick Jones, an associate curator at the British Museum. They quickly built a remarkable rapport and began working closely together in the study of Savitree’s material. Jones was convinced that the Thing with a Thousand Mouths cannot be Gol-Goroth: “Look to the Legendary of Bal-Sagoth,” he wrote in one letter. “The altar of Gol-Goroth is described in the Fragments and it bears no mouth. Nor does he corrupt the flesh of his chosen people, instead demanding pure and unadulterated sacrifices.”

By late 1928, Savitree agreed with him. “If my studies of the Black Stone have yielded any fruit, it is that Gol-Goroth does not seek a summons to our world. He forges bridges of his own and brings his chosen people unto himself. And from what I have reconstructed of Echavarria’s ritual, there is no doubt that it was not aimed at any servitor. He sought no Son or Daughter of the Thing with a Thousand Mouths, but rather sought to clothe the Thing itself in mortal flesh.”

Savitree, therefore, turned away from seeking lore of Gol-Goroth and instead focused on the much more difficult task of tracing the known properties of the Thing with a Thousand Mouths.

Her attention was drawn to Vietnamese legends surrounding Hang Maden, a cave in the Quang Binh Province. These legends were strictly local in character and had thus attracted little attention outside of Vietnam, but Savitree established a correspondence with the Duchess Anne Marie von Havener, the author of Drei Jahre in Vietnam. The countess had recounted a number of local myths, including one about helpful forest spirits who would manifest in the form of animated mouths (which was what had attracted Savitree’s attention in the first place). The story of Hang Maden had not been published, but the countess shared her accounts with Savitree.

Hang Maden is the Cave of Black Specters. The spirits of the cavern are said to belong to the “grandfathers of the grandfathers” from a time “before our skins were lightened or the hills were walked.” The spirits are said to be capable of granting immense and powerful favors, but always with a horrific price attached (Countess Anne Marie describes it as a “quaint depiction of Mephistopheles” in her notes). In fact, it is said that they cannot manifest or “touch the world” beyond the “heart of their cavern” unless given agency by a human hand or until such a time as “all the suns have turned in the sky.” By granting them agency through your flesh, you grant them the power to make your dreams come true.

What attracted Savitree’s attention, however, was the ruou tien, the “white milk of the cavern,” which is also described as the “nectar” of the specters. The countess elided her recounting of the stories surrounding the behavior of those who consumed the Nectar (describing it only as “unspeakable cruelties”), but what she was willing to hint at in her letters to Savitree was highly suggestive of the sort of power-hungry cruelty characteristic of the Mouth’s honey.

In 1929, Savitree hired Frederick Jones to replace Carsten Braunlich, who died in 1927, and officially formed the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities under his leadership. Arriving from England in April 1929, Jones quickly organized an expedition and departed for Vietnam in August of that year.

Jones’s journey inland from the coast was plagued by outbreaks of intransigent malaria among his porters, but he persevered and eventually confirmed the stories collected by the countess. Hang Maden itself, however, proved a disappointment. Jones described “vast, bleak halls of unrelenting darkness. At times it is almost impossible to believe that we remained confined within the cave. It seems as if we have instead wandered out upon the broken plains of some alien world where the sky lacks the fire of the stars.” His team explored literally miles of labyrinthine corridors studded with massive cavities in which entire skyscrapers could be raised. In one such chasm, a “slit of roof” had collapsed and in the “light which creeped through that distant sliver” a “swelling, impossible growth of tangled jungle had erupted within the cavern itself.”

But Jones found neither specters nor any sign of the Thing with a Thousand Mouths. Furthermore, his inquiries among the locals regarding their myths failed to reveal any particulars matching the ethnography they had hoped to find. If the ruou tien did exist, Jones concluded, it had nothing to do with the Mouth.

 

Wind Cave (1930)

Savitree’s interest in Hang Maden (the Cave of Black Specters) excited a general interest in mammoth caves all around the world. The Thing with a Thousand Mouths must manifest as it does-- must consume as it does-- because of an insatiable hunger. “That which the Mouth eats does not remain with the flesh of the Mouth. It is taken by the Thing and digested in some more-than-mortal Maw. If one would seek the truth of the Thing, one must find the Maw. And to find the Maw, one must follow the gullet.”

Savitree believed that the 1924 summoning ritual had caused the Maw to physically manifest-- or perhaps transdimensionally manifest-- somewhere “beneath the bosom of the Earth.” It followed, therefore, that there might be a physical path to “the Maw which is the Thing itself; the dissolution of all things.” And Savitree became convinced that the “passage to the Maw” was a cave or could be found within a cave.

Amidst a general survey of the great caverns of the world, Savitree became fascinated with Wind Cave in South Dakota upon observing that the boxwork mineral structures within the cavern exhibited “patterning similar to the scarification inflicted on those with lesser mouths.” Furthermore, the cave itself was known to “breathe”: a regular cycle of inhalations and exhalations over the course of days.

She traced the history of the cave through the myths of the Lakota and the Cheyenne, discovering that “much had been obfuscated through cycles of repetition.” From various fragments preserved across multiple stories, however, she managed to tease out the image of the “cave’s bite” (taking, in one case, the form of “malformed wolves” who emerge from the cave). Certainly there was a general caution to be found against anyone entering the cave for fear it would “swallow” them. And there was the pattern of mysterious disappearances in the 1890s and again around 1915.

In 1930, Jones organized an exhibition of the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities to investigate the cavern for Savitree. He consulted the 1902 United States Wind Cave Survey (USWCS) to plan his spelunking, but by 1930 the upper reaches of the cave were swarmed with tourists and the Civilian Conservation Corps were, in fact, already making a trail system to make these areas even more accessible. If there was anything hidden within Wind Cave, Jones knew it would be within the unexplored depths. (And there was, in fact, a curious reticence for further surveying among the government officials who had assumed control of the cave in 1913 under the auspices of making it a national park.)

Jones gained an academic permit under the pretenses of investigating primitive cave paintings. (Although none had been recorded in Wind Cave, Jones used his studies of Lakota legends to present a strong case that they might exist, even going so far as to assert that indicative ‘entrance paintings’ had been deliberately obliterated by the McDonald family in the 1880s.)

As they pushed into the depths of Wind Cave, the team’s mineralogist-- Professor Milo Kaufer-- began recording incredible speleothems he called “frostworks.” Bearing the appearance of ice crystals, the brilliantly white acicular growths of the frostworks were formed from some form of aragonite or perhaps calcite. Professor Kaufer, however, was baffled by the mechanism of their formation and by the small egg-like nodules which often accompanied them. Over time, however, he became convinced that the frostworks were emanating from some location deeper within the cave.

Following Professor Kaufer’s hunch, the team eventually reached a formation they referred to as the “Pharynx”: a black, almost circular gash in the rock through which the “chilled breath of the cave” was strong and fast. Rather than immediately passing through the Pharynx, Jones decided to pull back for the day and resupply. That night, Kaufer reported strange dreams “through which blue-white shadows danced.” In the morning, they found Hal Becker’s body. It appeared that he had overindulged and wandered away from the campsite and into a crevasse.

Becker’s death delayed a return to the cave, in no small part because a number of locals (particularly those of native descent) were increasingly opposed to the team’s exploration for some reason. Jones eventually hired Joan Kramer, a local woman, to replace Becker and secure their camp against vandalization.

A week later, Jones decides to permanently solve the problem by establishing a base camp within the cave itself, choosing for his location a large cavity on the far side of the Pharynx. Once situated in the new base camp, however, Kaufer’s dreams grew more frequent and he began experiencing seeming hallucinations while studying rock formations. In his journal he wrote, “I had the sense of a negative extrudence which pushed into our world. In the recesses of the cave there is a photo negative of reality: light becomes the absence and the darkness etches out the sharp-edged curves of all that is.” Then the camp watchers reported seeing blue lights in the darkness beyond their lights. And there are the dim, haunting suggestions of voices which “drift up on the chilled breath.”

In mid-August, Jones made a final effort to discover the Maw within Wind Cave, taking a small team to “follow the howl of the wind.” The team is assaulted by “hiemal wights.” Jones and several others are killed. The remnants of the team are forced to flee, eventually escaping through a small cave opening near the base of the Elk Mountain, “the breath of that dark abyss blowing stiffly on their backs.” Without any clear leadership left, they flee the area, narrowly avoiding the inquiries of local officers of the law.

With further research, Savitree concludes that the entities within Wind Cave are chillbanes, the existence of which she finds attested among certain obscure Norse eddas (as well as other places). Satisfied that everything mystical about Wind Cave can be laid at their feet, she dismisses it as being of no further interest.

 

Catacombs of the Pompeii Basilica (1931)

In tracing the Vietnamese legends which eventually led her to the Cavern of Black Specters, Savitree found a version of the tale recorded in the chronicles of a Vietnamese order of Vigencian monks. Their specific recounting of the story revealed little, but what struck Savitree about the 1890s chronicle was the familiarity it showed with the same depths of hidden mystery and dark history she was plumbing.

She tracked the obscure order back to its original monastery in Le Vigen, France. Studying its earliest records, she discovered that its founders had come from Syria and that they used Saint Alexius of Rome, patron saint of hunger, as a mask for their secret worship of the Thing with a Thousand Mouths. The Vigencians specifically used a two-faced depiction of Saint Alexius, and Savitree was able to use this iconography to track down a variety of illuminated manuscripts which had been created by the monks.

Encoded within the manuscripts, she discovered a secret lore: the Vigencians had begun their history as pre-Christian practitioners of the occult in ancient Rome. Persecuted by the Roman authorities, the elders of the cult had fled to Syria and only returned to western Europe c. 960 AD when Ali Saif al-Daula, the Emir of Aleppo, drove them out.

The medieval Vigencians recorded caches of secret lore which had been left to “await them” when the order had fled Rome. Savitree, however, was only able to identify the location of one of these caches: the catacombs of the Pompeii Basilica. And although the basilica had been excavated from the volcanic ruins in the 19th century, no catacombs had been discovered.

Under the new leadership of Mariam Soliman, a doctoral graduate of Oxford College, the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities was dispatched to Pompeii in 1931. Obfuscating the true nature of their excavations within the ruins was difficult and the initial location which Savitree thought she had identified proved to be wrong, further delaying their work.

Soliman, however, noted that there were several peculiarities in the pre-Vitruvian construction of the basilica. She studied several columnar reliefs within the basilica’s nave and combined them with Savitree’s research to ascertain the true location of the Vigencians’ hidden catacombs. Finally, in November of 1931, Soliman broke through into the subterranean chambers.

Unfortunately, much of the lore of the early Mouth cult had been destroyed. Papyri had been rendered to ash-hardened carbon. Wax tablets liberated from the library of Ashurbanipal had simply melted away.

Some material did survive, however, the most significant of which were strange orrery stelae looted from Egypt. Soliman’s notes (and later Savitree’s) are able to correlate them to known celestial cartography, but a vast quantity of “dark stars” have been included which cannot be viewed in the night sky. Soliman postulates that these are, perhaps, distant stars that could only be observed through powerful telescopes (although this would suggest that the Egyptians were possessed of astronomical technology far beyond any known to them). Savitree, however, seems to intimate that these “dark stars” are of a wholly different character.

 

Mount Ararat (1932)

In her collection of rare occult tomes, Savitree came into possession of a rare copy of The Key of Solomon in a Greek text purportedly translated directly from the Babylonian. Although she obtained the book in 1928, it sat on her shelf largely undisturbed as an occult curiosity. It was only in 1931 that she realized that the book contained not only the commonly known Book I and Book II of The Key of Solomon but also a previously unknown Book III.

Fraud or perhaps the ancient accretion of some other book of lore were the most likely culprits, of course, but as Savitree translated the text she discovered that it dealt almost entirely with the summoning of eidola ton stomon. Phantom mouths.

Although the eidola ton stomon do not seem to have exactly the same properties or behavior as the mouths manifested by Echavarria and his successors, Savitree discovered that the summoning rituals described shared several key points in common with the summoning ritual Echavarria performed in 1924. Unfortunately, the rituals are also frustratingly incomplete, requiring-- like much of The Key of Solomon-- an additional key or cypher to unlock.

Savitree also paid close attention to the Key’s strict warnings regarding the mouths: they were liars and could not be trusted unless you knew the identity of “the master above them” and used it to bind him (using combinations of the demon-binding rituals found in Book I of The Key of Solomon). The identity of the Master of the Mouths is, of course, left as a mystery, most likely confined to the same lock text as the ritual keys.

The book claims that its lore regarding the eidola ton stomon is venerably derived from “the teachings of Noah, from those who spoke to the Nephilim.” It tells of the legendary peak, the Precious Jewel on which hung a “Wreath of Mouths.” During the time before the Flood, the “nectar of bliss” was said to flow down the sides of the mountain and the air was filled with truth through the songs of the eidola ton stomon. In its descriptions of that time, The Key of Solomon waxes Biblical in its condemnations of the wickedness of the people, their greed and impiety and pride and disregard for the poor and helpless.

God grew angry at the sins of the world and flooded it. The Great One and its many Mouths drank the water of the flood and drowned. To show the completeness of His victory, God had His chosen survivors on their ark land on the very mountain which the Great One had once conquered.

By 1932, Savitree was convinced that the Precious Jewel had, at the very least, been a prehistoric site of worship for the Liar from Beyond. And it even seemed likely that it might be the true site of the Maw itself. Furthermore, The Key of Solomon gave her enough information to identify its likely location: Mount Ararat, the mountain where (tradition holds) Noah’s Ark landed.

Under the leadership of Mariam Soliman, the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities mounted an expedition to Mount Ararat in 1932. Their team climbed a number of faces of the mountain, but they found no mouth-sign, nor did they find any evidence of cavities or cave-works within the peak. Joan Kramer became increasingly convinced there was something “odd” about a sort of rift near the northwest side of the mountain and mounted repeated climbs in the area, which ultimately found nothing.

Soliman herself was not particularly enthused by these sorts of physical exertions, and she spent much of her time performing a wider anthropological and archaeological survey of the area. With the assistance of Inaaya Khadpo, a “mystical expert,” she was able to locate several ancient, heavily worn tombs in an isolated rift a few miles from the mountain. When Soliman excavated them, she found sealed caskets of lead. Most of the caskets were found to contain only dust, but inside of one she found the partial remains of a mouth carved from stone. Unfortunately, the stone of the mouth turned out to be extremely fragile (most likely from age, or perhaps from some environmental condition within the tomb) and it crumbled to dust shortly after the casket was opened.

Based on the reports from the Emporium’s team, Savitree’s final conclusion was that Mount Ararat was a dead end. It was even possible that her identification of the mountain was incorrect: while the Bible says Noah landed in the mountains of Ararat, scholars believe the Ark could be anywhere in that mountain range. She was as far from the Maw as she had ever been.

 

Sunken City of Nan Madol (1933)

Increasingly desperate to identify the Liar from Beyond, in 1932 Savitree reinterpreted certain rites within her rare copy of The Key Of Solomon to enrich several doses of Nectar. She took the enriched Nectar to “the Great Mouth in the sewers directly beneath the Phikhat Hwan” and consumed it in meditation before “the majesty of the Mouth.” The enriched Nectar caused her “mouth to split,” which she describes as doubling her jeopardy, but it also “turned her vision” through the Great Mouth, granting (as she had hoped) visions of its other sites of worship throughout history.

Of these visions, however, Savitree only succeeded in tracking down one with enough specificity to follow up on it. She had seen two tall, gray-skinned brothers with a curiously inhuman character to their features carrying the remains of a Great Mouth on a long sea voyage. She identified these figures as Olisihpa and Olsohpa, the legendary sorcerers who founded the Saudeleur Dynasty of the Pohnpeian people of Micronesia.

According to Pohnpeian legends, the twin sorcerers come from Kanamwayso, the “kingdom of glittering splendor” which had been destroyed by falling stars and earthquakes and sunk to the bottom of the sea. Arriving at the island of Pohnpei, Olisihpa and Olisohpa created a city in a single night, using a “flying dragon” to levitate huge stones and raise mighty walls of basalt. The brothers named the city Soun Nan-Leng (the Reef of Heaven) but the Pohnpeians named it Nan Madol (which means “the spaces between”).
Something went wrong either during or shortly after the building of Nan Madol, and Olisihpa died of “old age.” Olisohpa became the first Saudeleur. Under the Sixteen Saudeleurs, the Pohnpeians conquered a vast empire of islands. The wisdom of the Saudeleurs was spread through the empire, and cities modeled upon Nan Madol were constructed in many locations.

And in the heart of each of those cyclopean cities, Savitree believed, a Great Mouth held court.

The Pohnpeians believe that if they tell everything they know, they will die. As a result, they guard their knowledge very carefully. In addition, many threads of their oral tradition were broken by the smallpox epidemics which blighted their populations in the mid-nineteenth century. But according to the oral histories which survive, as recorded by German ethnologist and archaeologist Paul Hambruch during his 1910 expedition, the Sandeleurs became corrupted by their “secret voices” and grew ever more isolated in the inner recesses of their basalt citadels, “afraid to show their bare flesh to those they held in contempt.” According to those histories, a great hero named Idzikolkol raised a rebellion which “purified” the city of Lelu on the island of Kosrae. Crowned under the royal name of Isokelekel (the “shining noble”), Idzikolkol rallied the other cities and eventually laid siege and war upon Nan Madol itself. The Pohnpei remained a great people, but the rule of the Sandeleur and their “hidden mouths” (a “sycophantic class of nobility,” Hambruch explains) was broken forever.

In 1933, an expedition to Nan Madol was mounted through the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities. They sought the lost Tomb of the Twin Sorcerers. As Savitree suspected, Soliman discovered that the original construction of Nan Madol extended far beyond the ruins which remained today. A number of underwater expeditions were mounted. Soliman was upset with the destructive nature of these expeditions (as artifacts raised from the water did not survive long after exposure to air), but they were successful in pointing towards several possible sites for the Tomb, which was eventually located within Nindol, the rounded central hill of Temwen Island.

Within the Tomb, Soliman and her team found the petrified remains of a Great Mouth, a startling confirmation of the ancient worship of the Thing with a Thousand Mouths which had been hinted at in Vietnam. A vast quantity of inscriptions were found on the walls of the Tomb. Unfortunately, the name of the entity which had been worshipped by the Twin Sorcerers had been blotted out and replaced with the seal of Isokelekel whenever it appeared, apparently in the belief that this would lock away the power which had been venerated here.

Savitree appears to have been consumed with rage that “such precious knowledge would be lost to the petty superstitions of SAVAGES.” But the inscriptions recorded by Soliman from the Tomb were invaluable, and she worked to salvage what she could from the travesty. The most promising of the lines of inquiry she pursued were similarities between the inscriptions on the Tomb and the Revelations of Dagon.

RITE OF NECTAR ENRICHMENT

This rite enriches Nectar, creating a potent drink which gives the imbiber “the view of God.”

Great Sandy Desert of Australia

In May 1934, Mariam Soliman was contacted by Stirling Henry, a former colleague from Oxford College who was now living in Perth, Australia. Henry was writing because of Soliman’s “professed interest in any archaeological oddities that might cross my path.” It seemed that a mining engineer from Port Hedland named Robert B. F. Mackenzie had been knocking on the doors of anyone and everyone in Perth trying to drum up interest in ten or twelve photographs that he had taken of “cyclopean stone blocks” out in the vast middle of the Great Sandy Desert of Australia.

If it were not for the photographs, this report (like many others) would have had little interest for Savitree. But in the damnably faint impressions left on the age-sheered stone, Savitree found clear parallels to the odd stone carvings and “little red men” described in Victor Hill’s Legendry and Customs of Invermere. Although located on the opposite side of the globe, was it possible that Mackenzie’s stone blocks were related to the same lore that had given rise to the Revelations of Dagon and therefore could lead to the identity of the Liar from Beyond?

Follow-up inquiries revealed that Savitree was not the only party to become interested in Mackenzie’s claims. In fact, Miskatonic University in Massachusetts was planning a major expedition to the region and Mackenzie was coordinating closely with them.

Much as she had done with Leonard Kulik in ‘27, Savitree reached out to the Miskatonic University team in an effort to join their expedition, which was aiming for a departure date in the spring of 1935. She is currently in contact with Professor William Dyer of the college’s geology department.

 

Invermere

The stelae recovered from Pompeii in 1931 were damaged and the dark star orreries they contained were, frustratingly, fragmented. However, they contained enough information that Savitree was able to begin unravelling the complicated stellar cartography which had previously thwarted her attempts to interpret the Oracles of Sebek.

The incomplete nature of the orreries frustrated her attempts to pinpoint the specific time periods references in the Oracles, but she believed she had identified the “lake of starfall” as Deepfall Lake, a meteoric lake located on Westray in the Orkney Islands archipelago. Using her identification of Deepfall Lake, she was further able to identify a small island not far from Westray, on which lies the town of Invermere, as the “sacred isle” at which the Oracles proclaimed the “white stone must be risen.”

Given the known history of the Oracles and the rites which they describe, Savitree was fairly certain that these sites in Scotland were not, in fact, related to the Liar from Beyond and prioritized an expedition to Micronesia instead.

In 1930, however, she had obtained a copy of the Revelations of Dagon. Through a series of elaborate cross-references across all nine volumes of the Revelations, Savitree built a strong case that the Prisoner of Dagon-- a mysterious figure who reoccurred multiple times throughout the text-- was a close match for the Liar from Beyond. That-- though he had been summoned-- the Liar from Beyond was still crippled by the Wall which had been built by Dagon to circumscribe him.

By 1933, therefore, Savitree was attempting to ascertain the true origins of the Revelations of Dagon, hoping to discover more lore concerning the Prisoner of Dagon. These two lines of inquiry crossed paths when she encountered Victor Hill’s Legendry and Customs of Invermere (1896):

Perhaps one of the most overlooked resources concerning the queer myths which cling to Invermere is the Revelations of Dagon… Although largely incoherent, seemingly written by some addict of opium or perhaps as a romantic experimental piece, much of the imagery of the Revelations seems drawn from Invermere and the island of Westray. Most notably, it seems to grow out of the odd body of meteor-crazed legends that sprang up in the late 18th century around the location of Deepfall Lake, where a variety of local storytellers all seemed to spontaneously claim that an apocryphal meteor had fallen there… These varied images may be ascribed to mere happenstance, but an ethnographic study of the text suggests that there are a preponderance of locations relating to Invermere and its immediate surroundings, making it likely that the author or authors were familiar with the area and, most likely, native to it.

If the Sebekian “lake of starfall” were somehow connected to the creation of the Revelations of Dagon (or the lore behind the Revelations) then it might be the key that will finally unlock the identity of the Liar From Beyond. From her notes, it is clear that Savitree has made preparations for an expedition to Westray, with a particular interest in both Deepfall Lake and the Isle of Invermere.

Eternal Lies Spellbook

Cast Out The Black Pharaoh

Known By: Mordred (weird side effects), Oswald (weird side effects), Anita (weird side effects), Zoe (weird side effects)

Cost: Between 25 and 44 magic points; between 1 and 20 minutes plus ten seconds per caster. 

Casting the ritual to dismiss Nyarlathotep involves crossing oneself with holy water, crushing a single black pearl, and beseeching a string of Outer Gods whom Nyarlathotep serves to bid him travel elsewhere on their unknowable errands, carrying their unpronounceable messages for unknowable purposes.

The caster must initially invest 25 magic points for a 5% chance of dismissing Nyarlathotep. Each additional magic point sacrificed increases the chance the deity leaves by 5%. You cannot raise the chance of dismissing Nyarlathotep above 99%. Several people may cast the spell at once. The spell takes 1 minute per 5% chance of dismissing Nyarlathotep (each minute is another Elder God invoked), plus an additional ten seconds per caster.

Rituals of Self-Denial

Known by: Mordred, Lev, Oswald, Araari

Cost: Between 1 and 6 Sanity per week, depending on personal comfort with self-denial and particular vow.

To calcify a Minor Mouth or purify yourself until you are capable of destroying a Major Mouth, perform the Rituals of Self-Denial by paying Sanity and following some number of Vows. In most PC cases, to calcify a Minor Mouth, you must follow one vow; however, by Keeper discretion, you may be required to follow multiple vows (if e.g. you have used Nectar). To purify yourself such that you can destroy a Major Mouth, you must follow three vows for at least a month. The vow must be performed as a means of self-abnegation or self-sacrifice and not to achieve other particular goals. 

Sample vows:

Volcano Miracle

Known by: Araari

Cost: 20 magic points; 10 sanity points; 1D8+1 minutes casting time. 

You can make a volcano erupt, if you are near a volcano, by praying and chanting the secret names of God. The lava causes 1D8 damage per six seconds of contact.

Heart’s Courage

Known by: Araari

Cost: 5 POW; 4 sanity points; 24 hours casting time

If you write the secret name of God Azathoth into a wall or floor, and then pray for 24 hours, those who come near to the carving must intone Azathoth’s name to be allowed to move past. Failing that, the person may attempt a Hard POW roll to gain access: if failed, the person finds himself or herself paralyzed and frozen in place, although their body otherwise functions normally—they can speak and see, but cannot move. If left at the warding runes or carried past them, paralysis continues indefinitely and the target will die in 1D3 days. If carried back, away from the runes, the paralysis ends after 2D10 rounds. Those who were frozen by the ward may attempt to pass them again at a later time. 

Available Spells That No One Has Learned

Bonus Material

Non-spoiler-y props the PCs did not end up finding.

Bonus Material

Contents of Anemone's Mini-Library

Books Sourced from 1936 Sears catalogue (some may be mildly anachronous but I expect that similar books existed in all cases):

  1. Pocket bible 
  2. Dyke’s Automobile Encyclopedia & Dyke’s Self-Starter (mechanical repair)
  3. Carpentry (…carpentry)
  4. Henly’s Formulas (mathematics, carpentry)
  5. Radio Building and Repair (electrical repair)
  6. Fix it Yourself (mechanical repair, electrical repair)
  7. The Modern Home Physician (medicine, first aid)
  8. Amateur Nurse (first aid)
  9. Webster Graphic Dictionary (English)
  10. New International Atlas of the World
  11. 2 volume encyclopedia, 4892 pages
  12. Bookkeeping Made Easy (accounting)
  13. Practical Mathematics (mathematics)
  14. Dan Beard’s Camp Lore and Woodcraft (survival)
  15. Ships of the Seven Seas (history)
  16. Complete works of Shakespeare (felt like it and it was 85¢)
  17. Astronomy for Everybody (astronomy)
  18. Astronomy for Amateurs (astronomy)
  19. Outline of Man’s Knowledge (various)
  20. Popular History of the World (history)
  21. Story of Mankind (history)

Books Sourced from Wikipedia (found via Various Anemone Methods):

  1. The Science of Life (1929, biology)
  2. Extrasensory Perception (1934, occult)
  3. Principles of Criminology (1934, forensics)
  4. Psychic Phenomena of Jamaica (1934, occult)
  5. Myths and Legends of the Bantu (1933, history)
  6. Voodoos and Obeahs (1932, occult)
  7. Wild Talents (1932, occult)
  8. Black Elk Speaks (1932, occult)
  9. The Quest for Power (1932, engineering/history)
  10. The Phantom of the Card Table (1931, sleight of hand)
  11. The Stone Age Culture of Kenya Colony (1931, archeology/history)
  12. Remote People: A Report from Ethiopia & British Africa 1930-31  (1931, contemporary Africa)*
  13. An Outline Dictionary of Maya Glyphs (1931, mayan)
  14. An Outline of Modern Knowledge (1931, various)
  15. The Conquest of Space (1931, astronomy)
  16. The American Black Chamber (1931, cryptography)
  17. Mental Radio (1930, occult)
  18. Growing Up in New Guinea (1930, anthropology)
  19. The Megaliths of Upper Laos (1930, grabbed because it reminded her of the ziggurats book)
  20. Merck Index, 4th edition (1930, pharmacy)
  21. Psychic Self-Defense (1930, occult)            
  22. A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1930, history)
  23. Sane Occultism (1929, occult)
  24. Black Magic (1928, occult)
  25. Textbook of Biochemistry (1928, biology)
  26. Coming of Age in Samoa (1928, anthropology)
  27. Cecil Textbook of Medicine (1927, medicine)
  28. Mornings in Mexico (1927, contemporary mexico)
  29. Travels in the Congo (1927, congo)
  30. The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden (1926, occult??)
  31. Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926, history)
  32. The Calculating Machines (1926, engineering)
  33. Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1926, mathematics)
  34. New Lands (1925, occult??)
  35. The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1924, history)
  36. Medicine, Magic and Religion (1924, anthropology)
  37. The Egyptian Revival (1923, history)
  38. Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma (1923, history)
  39. The index of coincidence and its applications in cryptology (1922, cryptography)
  40. How to Analyze People On Sight (1921, psychology)
  41. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921, history/occult)
  42. Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (1920, egyptian)
  43. From Ritual to Romance (1920, history)
  44. The Outline of History (1920, history)
  45. The Dream: Introduction to the Psychology of Dreams (1920, ???)
  46. The Book of the Damned (1919, anomalistics)
  47. Folklore in the Old Testament (1918)
  48. Course in General Linguistics (1916, linguistics)
  49. Psychology of the Unconscious (1916, psychology)
  50. Practical Mysticism (1915, occult)
  51. The Religion of China (1915)
  52. Eclipses: Astronomically and Astrologically Considered and Explained (1915 translation of 1200s original, occult)
  53. Totem and Taboo (1913, anthropology/occult)
  54. The Cane as a Weapon (1912, brawl)
  55. The Mind of Primitive Man, (1911, anthropology)
  56. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (1911, occult/history)
  57. Kaye and Laby (1911, mathematics)
  58. The Book of Ceremonial Magic (1910, occult)
  59. The Crime of the Congo (1909, congo)
  60. Twentieth Century Impressions of Siam (1908, somewhat outdated siam/thailand)
  61. Occult Chemistry (1908, occult/…maybe chemistry too i guess??)
  62. Experimental Bacteriology (1906, biology)
  63. Fetichism in West Africa (1904, occult/anthropology)
  64. The Art of Cross-Examination (1903, honestly i picked this up bc it sounded cool)
  65. Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie (1902, “Sketch of a general theory of magic”, French essay by anthropologist Marcel Mauss)
  66. The Dangers of Spiritualism (1901, occult)
  67. Egyptian Magic (1899, occult/history)
  68. The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1897 english translation, heavily altered from a 1608 German original, occult)
  69. Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual (1896, occult)
  70. Egyptian Book of the Dead (English translation 1895, occult/history)
  71. Occult Science in Medicine (1893, occult)
  72. Finger Prints (1892, forensics)
  73. Notes on the Modern Survival of Ancient Amulets Against the Evil Eye (1890, anthropology/occult)
  74. Investigations into German Mythology (1889, history)
  75. Masks or Faces (1888, book on the psychology of acting)
  76. Canon of Eclipses (1887, astronomy but like in fact just a list of eclipses)
  77. Report of an Archaeological Tour in Mexico in 1881 (1884, archeology)
  78. On the Social Organization and Mode of Government of the Ancient Mexicans (1879, history)
  79. Anahuac: or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (1861, history)
  80. Antiquities of Mexico (1848, mayan/history)
  81. The Magus (1801, occult)
  82. Grand Grimoire (bullshit french occult book probably created around 1702, claims older)
  83. Galdrabók (compiled 1600, 1921 version of original text with translation into modern Swedish)
  84. History of the Galla (1593, history/ethiopia)
  85. A True & Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers between Dr. John Dee and some spirits (1500s, published 1659, occult)
  86. Diary for the years 1595–1601 (John Dee, privately printed in 1880, history/occult)
  87. Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533, 1651 English translation, occult)
  88. Speculum Astronomiae (1260, Latin, astronomy/occult)
  89. Records of the Grand Historian (94 BC Chinese history, French 1905 translation)
  90. Histoire générale de la Chine, ou Annales de cet Empire; traduit du Tong-kien-kang-mou par de Mailla (1783 12-volume French translation of Zizhi Tongjian, chinese history written in 1084 during the Song Dynasty)
  91. Kebra Nagast (14th century ethiopian history of Axum, translated into english in 1932)
  92. The Customs of Cambodia (1297 account of the Khmer empire written in chinese, translated into french in 1902)

*No wikipedia article, found via Goodreads

Bonus Material

Lev's Grades

1919-1920


Military Basic Training: D

Basket Ball: D

Hygiene: A

Elements of French: A

Roman Tragedy: A

General Anthropology: Origin and Development of Civilizations: A

Principles of Economics: A

First-Year Reading and Composition: A


Military Basic Training: C

Gymnastics and Class Games: D

Advanced Elementary French: A

Ovid: A

General Anthropology: Origin and Antiquity of Man: A

Principles of Economics: A

Industrial and Commercial History of the United States: A

First-Year Reading and Composition: A


1920-1921


Military Basic Training: D

Intermediate French: A

Primitive Society: A

The American Indians: A

Advanced Economic Theory: A

History of Europe in the Later Middle Ages: A

Great Men of the Orient: India and the Far East: A

Introduction to Psychology: A


Military Basic Training: D+

Advanced Intermediate French: A

The Evolution of Man and the History of the Races of Mankind: A

The Origin and Development of Human Culture: A

Classical Culture in the Middle Ages: A

Great Men of the Orient: the Near East: A

Mental Hygiene: A

Introduction to Psychology: A


1921-1922

Comparative Government: A

Theory of the State: A

The Abnormal Mind: A

Mind and the Organism: A

Chapters in Culture History: A

Outlines of Culture Growth: A

Primitive Religion: A

Primitive Society: A


Comparative Government: A

Medical and Psychological Problems: A

Clinical Psychology: A

History of Experimental Psychology: A

Primitive Society: A

Indians of California: A

Oceania: A


1922-1923

Seminar in Applied Methods: A

Anthropological Theory: A

Special Study for Advanced Undergraduates: A

Social Psychology: A

Industrial and Commercial History of Europe: A

Experimental Psychology: A

Child Psychology: A

Roman Imperialism: A


Seminar in Applied Methods: A

Anthropological Theory: A

Special Study for Advanced Undergraduates: A

Social Psychology: A

Immigration: A

Care of Dependents: A

Medieval France: A

Principles of Politics: A